How to Read a Cosmetic Ingredient List

The ingredient list is the one part of the packaging that has to tell the truth. Learning to read it beats any claim on the front of the box.

The order means something

Ingredients appear in descending order of concentration down to about the 1% mark, after which the order is up to the manufacturer. The first five entries tell you what the product mostly is. If the active you are paying for sits near the bottom, you are buying a very small amount of it.

INCI names

Products use standardised INCI names, which is why the same ingredient reads identically on a British and an American label. It is also why the list looks intimidating: "tocopherol" is vitamin E, "aqua" is water.

Fragrance is a category, not an ingredient

"Fragrance" or "parfum" can stand in for dozens of individual substances that need not be listed separately. If your skin reacts unpredictably to products with nothing obvious in common, fragrance is the first thing to rule out.

What the front of the box cannot tell you

"Clean", "natural" and "chemical-free" have no fixed legal meaning in cosmetics. They describe marketing. The ingredient list describes the product.