Ingredient Transparency
When you have an allergy or are otherwise trying to avoid certain chemical ingredients in beauty and personal care products…cutting through the scientific jargon on ingredients labels can be a challenge.
Another challenge is that not all ingredients are required to be listed on labels (and some can be hidden under blanket terms like “fragrance”).
This can be hard, especially when you really need to trust that what you’re about to use isn’t going to give you a rash later! Hello sensitive skin!
We have a couple of tricks that have helped us along the way.
Use an ingredient list debunkers.
One of our favourite tools to help you understand chemical ingredients in a simple way is the website
Steps to using INCIDecoder:
- Find your product online, and copy the ingredients list.
- Copy and past the ingredient list into their Decoder here.
- INCIDecoder will spit out the ingredients one by one with easy-to-understand explanations so that you can decipher what is in your product.
For mobile apps there are a few out there - one of them being Think Dirty app.
One thing to note is that we find the Think Dirty app isn’t fully tailored to product recommendations based on your specific allergy but you can make sure setup your allergies in your profile and you’ll be warned if the app detects the ingredient.
Disclaimer - not every country is required to list all ingredients on their labels and so some of the data inputs may not be 100% accurate or available for you.
Email the brand directly.
While it’s time consuming, it can be useful to google the product’s actual website, find the “Contact Us” section and email them. We’ve done this on numerous occasions all with responses from the brand or their manufacturers.
Here is a template you can use.
“Hi there,
I love your products but I have an allergy to the chemical called [limonene]. This is often found in [fragrances, laundry detergents, cleaning products, personal care products] and can also come from [the oil from the rind of citrus fruits, essential oils like eucalyptus, bergamot] and so on.
Could you let me know if your [shampoo product] contains this chemical? Does the term “fragrance” listed on this product ingredients list include the chemical [limonene] and/or would you know which kind of chemicals are used in the fragrance in particular.
Thanks so much,
[Name]”
Look for product or safety statements on the brand’s website.
You might need to spend a bit of time searching but sometimes brands will provide ingredients sections or even statements or downloads about a certain product. We often scroll down to the footer to find these links and you should keep an eye out for things like:
- ingredients
- product safety statement
- product disclosure statement
These documents might get a little technical but they do often list more thorough information about ingredients contained within a certain product.
If in doubt - patch test.
If you’re not comfortable with either of the responses from the above steps, make sure you patch test :).