Tools & data / the record, made usable
Find out what you're really paying for
Three free tools built on the same verified data behind the dossiers — every active priced, every brand graded, any label decoded. Nothing here is gated.
The Actives Index
Every active, ranked by price per gram
The cheapest effective dose of each skincare active — and how far the price of the same molecule stretches across products that disclose their concentration.
Open the index →The Disclosure Scorecard
Which brands tell you the dose
We graded the brands on whether they publish the concentration of their headline active — or make you guess. Every grade sourced.
See the grades →The INCI Decoder
Paste a label, see the actives
Drop any product's ingredient list in and we pull out the actives that actually do something, say what each does, and link the verified dossier.
Decode a list →What each one is for
The Actives Index
Every skincare active we cover, ranked by price per gram of the active ingredient — not per bottle. A serum's working ingredient is a commodity; what varies is how much of it you get and what you pay for the packaging around it. The index computes that number for every product that publishes its concentration, which makes the tenfold price gaps between chemically identical formulas visible for the first time. Use it when you have decided what you need and want to know what it should cost.
The INCI Decoder
Paste any product's ingredient list and it pulls out the actives that do something, explains each, and links the sourced dossier. Cosmetic labels are legally required to list ingredients in descending order of concentration, which means the position of an active on the list tells you roughly how much is in there — a "hero" ingredient sitting at position twenty-eight is a marketing garnish. The decoder runs entirely in your browser; the label you paste is never sent anywhere. Use it in a shop, on a bottle you already own, or on a product page before you buy.
The Disclosure Scorecard
A grade for each brand on one question: do they tell you how much of the active is actually in the bottle? Publishing a concentration is voluntary almost everywhere, and most brands decline — which is why so much of the shelf cannot be priced per gram of active at all. The scorecard is deliberately neutral: it records who publishes and who doesn't, not who is good. Use it to know whether a brand's silence is habitual before you pay for a claim you cannot check.
All three run on the same underlying records as the ingredient dossiers, and all three are downloadable — the Actives Index and the Disclosure Scorecard are published as open CSV and JSON so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it. The method behind every number is written out on the methodology page.