Should You Trust Cosmetic Ingredient Rating Apps?

You've scanned your moisturiser with an ingredient app. Most of the ingredients are green – then suddenly there's a red one marked “high risk”.

Should you stop using it?

Not necessarily. A high ingredient score can look alarming, but it doesn't always tell you how risky that ingredient is in the product you're actually using.

One of the biggest pieces of missing information is often surprisingly simple: how much?

An ingredient can cause problems at a high dose while being considered safe at the much smaller amount used in a cosmetic. How the product is used matters too – something you rinse off in a shampoo isn't the same as something that stays on your skin all day.

So before you throw away half your bathroom cabinet, here's how to make better sense of those ingredient scores.

A red score doesn't necessarily mean “dangerous”

One of the problems with ingredient scores is that they can make safety look very black and white: green is good, red is bad.

In reality, the amount of a substance matters enormously.

Take ordinary salt. Salt is a natural substance and sodium is something our bodies need. Most of us eat salt every day without thinking twice about it.

But that doesn't mean you can consume unlimited amounts of salt. Too much can be harmful to your health.

The salt hasn't suddenly changed from “safe” to “toxic”. The amount has changed.

The same basic principle matters when we're looking at cosmetic ingredients. An ingredient may be capable of causing harm at a high enough dose without the much smaller amount used in a properly formulated cosmetic presenting the same risk.

Natural skincare ingredients show this too

You don't have to look at controversial synthetic ingredients to see why concentration matters. There are plenty of examples in natural skincare.

Plants contain powerful natural compounds. That's one of the reasons they're so interesting in skincare – but it also means that more isn't automatically better.

Tea tree oil provides a particularly good real-world example.

Cosmetic safety experts don't simply put tea tree oil into a “safe” or “unsafe” box. They consider how much is being used and what sort of product it's being used in.

In a European safety assessment, different concentrations of tea tree oil were considered safe for different adult cosmetic uses – including a higher concentration in rinse-off shampoo than in face cream that stays on the skin.

Salicylic acid gives us another example. The amount considered suitable in cosmetics varies depending on the type of product and how it's used.

The type of product matters too

It's not only the amount of an ingredient that matters. Think about how you're actually using the product.

Take shampoo and moisturiser.

You might massage shampoo into your hair and scalp for a minute before washing it down the drain. A moisturiser could stay on your face all day.

A spray is different again because there's a possibility of breathing some of it in.

A lip product might be used in relatively small amounts, but some of it can be swallowed during normal use.

So simply knowing that an ingredient is present doesn't give you the whole picture.

How much is there? How often do you use it? Does it stay on your skin or get rinsed away?

These are the sorts of questions considered when cosmetic ingredients and products are assessed for safety. A single ingredient score may not be able to show you all that context.

Why can ingredient scores look so alarming?

The big attraction of ingredient apps is that they make complicated information easy to understand.

Scan a barcode, look at the colour or number and get an instant answer.

That's convenient. But turning complicated science into a single score inevitably means some of the detail gets lost.

An ingredient might be flagged because a study found a problem at a high dose. Another might be flagged because it can cause an allergic reaction in some people. Another may raise concerns only when used in a particular way.

Those are quite different things, even if they all end up with a similar red warning on your phone.

Why can the same ingredient get different scores?

You might also notice that an ingredient gets a poor rating on one app and a better rating somewhere else.

Different apps and ingredient databases can use different research, give more weight to different concerns and have their own ways of turning that information into a score.

One system might focus heavily on whether an ingredient has ever been linked with a particular problem. Another may give more consideration to how it's normally used in cosmetics.

That's another reason not to treat a single score as the final word on an ingredient.

So are ingredient-rating apps useful?

Yes. They can be really useful.

Ingredient apps have made it much easier to find out what's actually in our skincare, haircare and make-up.

They can help you spot ingredients you want to investigate, understand unfamiliar names and identify substances you personally prefer to avoid.

They can be particularly useful if you're looking at a long ingredients list and don't know where to start.

The trick is to use the score as a starting point, rather than treating it as the final answer.

What should you do when an ingredient is flagged?

You don't need to become a cosmetic scientist every time an app gives something a red score.

A few simple questions can give you a much better idea of what the warning actually means.

Does this apply to natural ingredients too?

Absolutely.

Natural doesn't mean weak or inactive. Plants contain thousands of naturally occurring chemical compounds, and some can have very real effects on the skin.

That's part of what makes natural skincare interesting.

Plant oils, butters and botanical extracts can provide complex combinations of fatty acids, antioxidants and other naturally occurring compounds. Good natural formulation is about selecting those ingredients intelligently and using them at appropriate levels.

Essential oils are a particularly obvious example. They're concentrated plant extracts containing numerous natural compounds. Used appropriately they can be part of a well-formulated cosmetic, but that doesn't mean pouring undiluted essential oil onto your skin is a good idea.

Again, the amount matters.

How does MyPure approach ingredients?

We've specialised in natural and organic beauty since 2004, so what goes into the products we sell matters to us.

But we don't think a single red or green score tells you everything you need to know about an ingredient.

We'd rather understand what the ingredient is, why it's being used, how much is being used and what the evidence actually says.

That doesn't mean dismissing concerns about ingredients. Quite the opposite. It means looking at them properly rather than relying on a colour or number alone.

It's also why our approach to natural beauty isn't simply a list of ingredients to avoid. What's included matters too.

You can read more about the standards behind the products we choose in our MyPure Purity Promise.