Topic

Reading the ingredient list

What an INCI list tells you about a product before you ever open it, and what it stubbornly refuses to tell you.

An ingredient list is ordered by concentration down to one percent, and unordered below it. That single rule does most of the work. If a marketed hero ingredient sits after the preservative and the fragrance, it is present at a level chosen for the label rather than for your skin. If a humectant sits second, the product is going to feel like a humectant does. You can predict a great deal of a product's texture, its likely irritation profile and its actual centre of gravity from the list alone.

What the list will not tell you is percentage above the one-percent line, the exact grade or molecular weight of a polymer or an acid, the pH of the finished formula, or how well the whole thing is put together. Cosmetic elegance is real and it is not in the INCI. So the list is a floor, not a verdict: it rules things out reliably and rules things in only provisionally.

We publish the ingredient list for every product where we hold one, taken from the Korean-market unit, and we say which market a list came from. That is unusual. Most retailers in this category publish a marketing paragraph and a hero-ingredient graphic, which is exactly the information you already had from the front of the box.