Tool · reads any ingredient list

Paste a label. Read what it says.

An ingredient checker for skincare and hair products. Paste the ingredient list from any jar, tube or bottle and it is read back in order: where the water sits, where fragrance appears, how many silicones are named, and what each recognised ingredient is there to do. It counts and it names. It does not score.

The rules a list is written under

What a list can say, and what it cannot.

In order, down to 1%.

US labelling rules require a cosmetic to name each ingredient in descending order of predominance: 21 CFR 701.3(a). The first name is the largest share of the product.

In any order below it.

Ingredients at 1% or less may follow in any order, and color additives may come last in any order: 21 CFR 701.3(f). An ingredient near the end may be present at a hundredth of a percent.

Where the 1% line is.

No list marks it. Phenoxyethanol, a common preservative, is authorised in the EU at no more than 1% (Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, Annex V), so where it appears, it and what follows are likely at 1% or less.

Never a percentage.

No rule asks for one. A list shows the order of its ingredients and not the amount of any of them.

The same regulation lets a scent be declared in one word. What that word may cover is set out in natural and synthetic fragrance, read from the label, and the method of reading a list by hand is in how to read a skincare label.

How the reader works

It knows 436ingredient names and recognises others by the shape of the name: a name ending in “-cone” or “-siloxane” is a silicone, and “CI” with a number is a colorant. Each recognised name is given its usual job in a formula. A name it does not know is shown as not recognised. It reads the list as pasted: it cannot see amounts, and it does not know or ask whose product it is.