Verified Beauty Data

Author / Who writes this

Erin Rose

Founder, Verified Beauty Data

I build tools that make hidden data legible. Before this I founded CareCost Estimate, where I parsed tens of terabytes of federally mandated — but practically unreadable — healthcare pricing files into something a patient could actually use. Verified Beauty Data does the same job for skincare: take the primary sources almost nobody reads, and turn them into numbers you can check.

01 / Standing

What I am, and what I'm not

I am not a dermatologist, a cosmetic chemist, or an esthetician, and nothing on this site is medical advice. I'm a data engineer. That is exactly why every page here is built so that you never have to take my word for anything.

I have not done my own pH testing, stability testing, sensory panels, or efficacy trials, and I don't pretend otherwise. This site works from published label data and published science. Where a brand publishes a percentage or a pH, it is shown and marked brand-published. Where the evidence is in-vitro only, or the trial was small or industry-funded, or a heavily marketed botanical turns out to be a 0.2% garnish near the bottom of the INCI list, the page says so. The honest caveats are the product, not a disclaimer.

Sites in this category usually rent a clinician's photograph for the byline. I would rather show you the sources.

02 / Accountability

What stands in place of a credential

  1. 586 primary sources, individually verified

    Every scientific claim on an ingredient page links to a specific PubMed record. Each PMID is checked against the NCBI E-utilities API — title, year and abstract confirmed, retractions screened out — before it ships. If a claim cannot be tied to a real, checkable paper, it does not go on the page.

  2. INCI resolved against the EU CosIng register

    Every product formula is tokenised into individual INCI ingredients and matched to the European Commission cosmetic-ingredient database, so "Aqua", "Water" and "Eau" collapse to one ingredient and a formula comparison compares like with like.

  3. Prices and ASINs verified through the Amazon Product Advertising API

    A price on this site came from the API on a stated date, not from a marketing page. The date is printed next to the number so you can see how stale it is.

  4. The data is downloadable

    The Actives Index and the Disclosure Scorecard are published as open CSV and JSON at /data/, and the whole site is machine-readable at /llms.txt. You can audit the numbers without trusting the page they are rendered on.

The full method is written out on the about and methodology page, the independence and affiliate policy is stated separately, and every fix I have had to make is logged publicly in the corrections log.

03 / Motive

Why I built this

Skincare runs on confusion. The same molecule sells for $3 and $300 a gram. Brands print "contains niacinamide" and decline to say whether that means 10% or 0.1%. The evidence that would settle it is free and public — PubMed, the EU CosIng register, published ingredient lists — it just isn't legible. Making it legible is a data problem, and data problems are what I do.

If a formula here doesn't match the bottle in your hand, or a study doesn't say what I claim it says, that is a verifiable error and I want to hear about it. Email hello@verifiedbeautydata.com — corrections get logged publicly.