What "verified" means here

Most skincare information online is either marketing or vibes. We're trying to be the third thing: a structured, sourced reference you can actually act on. For every active ingredient we answer the questions a careful shopper actually asks — does it work, at what concentration, at what pH, who should avoid it, and what pairs with it — and tie each answer to a specific study. For real products, we verify the ingredient list, confirm the price, and rank them by price per gram of active, so "expensive" and "effective" stop being the same word.

We also publish what the evidence doesn't show. Where a benefit is in-vitro only, where a clinical trial is small or industry-funded, where a brand's "rice" or "licorice" is a 0.2% garnish — we say so. The honest caveats are the product, not a disclaimer.

Ingredient science. Each ingredient page is built from the peer-reviewed literature. We query PubMed directly, read the abstract of every study we cite, ground each claim in what that study actually found, independently re-verify each reference's title and year, and screen out retracted papers. If a claim can't be tied to a real, checkable source, it doesn't ship.

Formula matching. Every product formula is tokenized into its individual INCI ingredients and matched against the EU CosIng database, so naming differences collapse to one ingredient. Our dupe match score is an IDF-weighted similarity: sharing a rare ingredient (Ethoxydiglycol, a specific peptide) counts far more than sharing water or glycerin, which prove nothing.

Products & price. We confirm a product genuinely contains an active by checking its published INCI and where the active sits in the list — a hero ingredient near the top counts; a token at position 28 does not. Prices and product identities are verified live, and we compute price-per-gram-of-active wherever a percentage is disclosed.

No brand pays for placement or for a verdict. Rankings are computed from price and disclosed actives; the editorial verdicts are our read of that data, and the method stays public so you can disagree with us precisely.

Affiliate links. Some product links are affiliate links — if you buy through them we may earn a small commission, at no cost to you. This never changes which product wins a ranking or what a verdict says: the cheapest-per-active product is named whether or not it carries a commission, and we routinely point to options we earn nothing on. Affiliate links are marked, and carry the appropriate rel="sponsored" attribution.

The method above is the whole method — so if a formula here doesn't match the bottle in your hand, or a study doesn't say what we claim it says, that's a verifiable error and we want it. Tell us what the label or the paper actually says and we re-verify and update the page. Every page carries a "Verified" date that reflects the last time its content was substantively reviewed, so you can always see how fresh a page is.