About the author
AcneTracker is written and maintained by Olav Sie Rotvær, a software developer with a long-standing interest in skincare.
It started as a personal reference. The information I wanted — what an ingredient actually is, what the evidence says it does, whether two things can be used together — was scattered across research papers, regulatory databases and marketing copy, and none of it was in one place. So I built the place. Once it was useful to me, I expanded it into tools other people could use too.
I am not a clinician
I have no medical or dermatological training, and nothing on this site should be read as medical advice. That is stated plainly on every page for a reason: on health-adjacent topics, knowing what the author is not qualified to tell you matters as much as knowing what they are.
What I can do is read a source carefully, record exactly what it says, and show you where it came from. Every ingredient page lists its references. Where the evidence is weak, contested or absent, the page says so instead of filling the gap with confident prose.
How the data gets here
Ingredient identity and function come from the European Commission's CosIng database and PubChem. Claims about effects come from published research, primarily via PubMed, and from safety reviews such as the Cosmetic Ingredient Review. Comedogenic ratings are traced to their original published source rather than copied from other websites — which is how this site ended up documenting seven errors that the web has been copying from a single 1989 table.
Where a claim has no source I can point at, the claim does not go on the page. That rule is what the whole database rests on, and it is the reason it grows slowly.
AI helps me draft the explanatory text around that data — I say so openly, and the editorial policy sets out exactly where it is and is not involved, and what gets checked before anything publishes.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to know, and I will fix it and say that I did. The contact page is the fastest route. Corrections to sourced factual claims are the most useful thing you can send me.