How to check skincare ingredients?Updated a year ago
Ideally, we want to see published studies on humans that show that a product or ingredient really does what it claims to do. So a great example would be retinaldehyde. We selected it as the star ingredient in our Enzyme-Active Retinol Serum specifically because we found the research so convincing!
If you go into a search engine and search for “retinaldehyde + skin + research,” you’ll land on a few different human studies dating back as far as 1994 that show its wrinkle-fighting effects. They include double-blind, controlled trials as well as one study that compared retinal (favorably!) with prescription-strength retinoic acid.
So feel free to steal our approach:
- Go into Google or your favorite search engine, and type in the name of the ingredient along with the words “skin” or “topical” and “research.”
- When you search, look for studies published through PubMed or other similar research aggregators.
- You can also add words like “wrinkles” or “acne” to your search if you’re researching a product that promises to fix those specific issues.
Once you find the research, try to understand exactly what a product is meant to do, how it’s meant to do it, and at what concentration or delivery system.
More often than not, when examining a product from most brands, what we find is either no scientific backing at all or very preliminary research done on skin cells in a petri dish (i.e., in vitro) and not on humans, which doesn’t correlate with the amazing claims they make.
Another factor we like to consider is where the research comes from. To find that out, you can usually glance at the “Acknowledgments” section of a paper, between the conclusion and references. If you want to dig even deeper, you can look up the names of the researchers who put the paper together, to find out whether they have any brand affiliations.
Especially for patented ingredients, the research isn’t independent but comes from the brands or manufacturers. This makes it less trustworthy since there’s an inherent bias in sponsoring research that’ll help you sell a product.
Using ingredient checkers as a shortcut
When we’re in a rush, we’re big fans of INCIDecoder, which is a website that gives excellent summaries of ingredient claims and research. You type in the name of the product, and you’ll get a full ingredient list along with a largely unbiased explanation of what the ingredients do.
That said, even INCIDecoder isn’t perfect - it doesn’t always include all research, and sometimes the ingredient descriptions include unverified claims made by the manufacturers.