The Ingredient Lab reads the science on personal care ingredients and explains it in plain language, for New Zealand and Australia. This page explains how we work: where our information comes from, how we weigh it, and why we will never give a product a score. We show our reasoning so you can decide for yourself. If the way we work changes, we will tell you.
Most ingredient apps give a product a number or a grade. We don't, and we never will. A single score hides its own reasoning. It squeezes three very different things into one number: how much of an ingredient is actually in the product, how strong the science behind a concern really is, and whether that concern even applies to you.
Two ingredients can end up with the same grade for completely opposite reasons, and the number can't tell you which. All it really says is "worry" or "relax," and it asks you to take that on trust. We do the opposite. We show you what the evidence says, how solid it is, what the regulators think, and how much of the ingredient is likely there. Then you decide.
An informed reader doesn't need a score. A score is what you give someone you're not willing to explain things to.
Every concern we raise is backed by a published, peer-reviewed study or an official safety assessment we can point to. If there's no research on something, we don't invent a concern, and we don't pretend one exists.
We rely on real science and real regulators, the kind of official bodies that assess cosmetics in the EU, the US, Australia and New Zealand. We don't build our findings on marketing claims or crowd-sourced ratings. And when the experts genuinely disagree, we tell you they disagree, rather than quietly picking a side for you.
Treating a weak study like a strong one is exactly how scares get started. So we weigh it. Research on real people carries the most weight. Research on animals carries less. A result from cells in a lab dish, while still real, carries the least, because a dish is not a body, and the doses used may be nothing like what reaches your skin.
When a worry is based only on a lab-dish result, we'll tell you it exists, but we won't blow it up into something the stronger evidence doesn't support. And where the science genuinely hasn't settled a question, we say so and show both sides. We won't pretend to have an answer the researchers themselves don't have yet.
When we look at an ingredient, we tell you two things separately, because they really are different. The first is how much the evidence actually worries us. The second is how sure the science is. These can point in different directions.
We might be very sure that no solid link has been found between an ingredient and a health problem, and that's a genuinely reassuring thing to be able to say. But there is one thing we will never say: that an ingredient is "proven safe." Science can't prove a negative that cleanly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is offering a certainty they don't have. So we stick to what can honestly be said, and no more.
A hazard isn't the same as a risk. It depends on the dose. Salt, water, even oxygen are harmful in the wrong amount. What actually matters is how much of an ingredient is in a product, what kind of product it is, and how often you use it.
So we don't just ask whether an ingredient could be a concern in theory. We ask how much is likely to be there, and whether that adds up to a real concern in normal use, including across all the products you might use in a day.
There's a catch, and we're upfront about it. We can only do this properly when a brand lists all of its ingredients. Ingredient lists show the rough order, from most to least, but not the exact amounts. We use that order as a guide, never as a precise number, and on every product we tell you whether the brand gave us enough to work with. When they didn't, we say so.
We look at every product across eight areas. Each one is just a plain question.
Two labels carry most of the meaning on a product page. Read them together: one tells you the finding, the other tells you how much weight to give it.
We're paid by the people who read us, through subscriptions, and by nothing else. No brand deals. No affiliate links. No ads. No paid placement. No badges sold to brands.
This isn't just a promise to behave. It's built into how the business works: nothing we earn is allowed to change a result. The moment a site's income depends on what it says about a product, you can't fully trust what it says. If a brand looks good here, it's because the evidence put it there.