Evidence-based skincare
Understand your skin, ingredient by ingredient
A calm, evidence-based skincare encyclopedia: what ingredients do, what you can combine, why you break out where you do — plus free tools to check products and track your own skin.
The stuff you actually need to know
Short, accountable answers to what people ask most — each with a deeper page if you want to dig in.
Paste an ingredient list. See what clogs pores.
Copy the INCI list from any product and the checker flags the ingredients with a high published comedogenic rating — in seconds. Based on published research, not guesswork.
Try the checker- Aqua
- Coconut Oil 4/5
- Glycerin
- Isopropyl Myristate 5/5
- Niacinamide
- Myristyl Myristate 5/5
- Dimethicone
Comedogenic ratings across the dictionary
How the 245 ingredients we profile are distributed across the 0–5 pore-clogging scale.
Ratings describe raw ingredients, not finished products. Values marked fulton1989 are read from Fulton's Table I; every other rating carries its own provenance on the ingredient's own page.
Show the numbers
| Comedogenic rating | Ingredients |
|---|---|
| 0/5 | 99 |
| 1/5 | 36 |
| 2/5 | 37 |
| 3/5 | 34 |
| 4/5 | 26 |
| 5/5 | 13 |
We read the table again, row by row
Almost every comedogenic table online is a copy of a copy of Fulton (1989). We rebuilt the dataset from the page images of the original paper and found seven values that had been copied wrong. This is what the whole table looks like once you count it.
See the method and the correctionsFour databases to browse
Find your own triggers
Log breakouts alongside sleep, stress, diet and routine. Over time the tracker shows which factors actually correlate with your skin — completely free.
Open the trackerIllustrative: an example of the correlations a user might see.