Affiliate disclosure

Verified Beauty Data is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Every buy link on the site passes through our own /go/ redirect and arrives at Amazon carrying the tag verifiedbeauty-20. If you buy something within Amazon's cookie window, Amazon pays us a percentage. We are told the totals long after the fact and in aggregate — we never learn which reader bought what.

Every one of those links is marked in the page's HTML with rel="sponsored", which is the attribute Google asks publishers to use for paid or commissioned links. You can verify this yourself: view source on any product page and search for sponsored. Links to sources — PubMed, the EU CosIng register, INCIDecoder, brand labels — carry no such attribute and earn us nothing.

Rankings are computed, not chosen. Where a brand discloses its active percentage, we calculate price per gram of active and order the list by that number. The arithmetic does not know what any product pays. A cheap product from a brand that pays us 3% outranks an expensive one that pays 10% every time, because the formula only sees dollars and grams.

We routinely point at things we earn nothing on. Where the honest answer is that the expensive original has no real dupe, the page says so. Where a product is sold direct and not on Amazon, we still name it and simply do not earn from it. Where a brand does not authorise Amazon resellers — SkinCeuticals is the standing example — we show the product, explain the counterfeit risk, and generate no buy link at all.

Nobody can buy their way in. No brand has ever paid for placement, a verdict, or a position in a ranking, and we decline those requests when they arrive. We take no sponsored content and no paid guest posts. If that ever changes it will be stated on this page before it appears anywhere else on the site.

A disclosure is only worth what it can be tested against, so the underlying data is published: the Actives Index and the Disclosure Scorecard are downloadable as open CSV and JSON from /data/. Take the numbers, sort them yourself, and see whether the ranking we publish is the one the arithmetic produces.

If you find a case where it isn't — where a pricier product with a fatter commission sits above a cheaper one with the same disclosed dose — that is a bug or a lie, and either way we want to know. Email hello@verifiedbeautydata.com and it goes in the corrections log.

Some pages carry display advertising served programmatically by third-party networks. We do not choose those advertisers, we have no relationship with them, and their presence on a page has no bearing on its content. Advertising is deliberately kept off the pages where it would sit between you and a purchase decision. What data those networks collect, and how to opt out, is set out in the privacy policy.