Ingredients to avoid (and what to use instead)

For most people no single product is the problem — the EU caps individual parabens at 0.4% (1988/EC Annex V) and the US FDA has not banned them, precisely because per-product exposure at those levels is considered tolerable. The unresolved question is aggregate exposure: the same preservative or fragrance carrier across eight products used daily, which no regulator assesses as a whole. Each guide states what a regulator has actually done, what the research shows, and where the remaining call is personal risk tolerance.

Start with leave-on products applied over a large skin area every day — body lotion, deodorant, foundation, sunscreen. A lotion stays on skin for hours; a shampoo is in contact for roughly 40 seconds before it is rinsed, so per-use exposure is orders of magnitude lower. Swapping rinse-off products first costs the same money and buys far less.

Labels use INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) names — Latin or chemical, never marketing names — and many substances carry five or more synonyms. "Parabens" never appears on a pack; "propylparaben" and "butylparaben" do. We index every alias for each flagged ingredient so your scan terms match what is actually printed.

In most markets it is unregulated marketing. A pack can read "paraben-free" while using phenoxyethanol or a formaldehyde-releasing preservative, or "sulfate-free" while using a near-identical surfactant such as sodium coco-sulfate. We screen the ingredient list and its aliases rather than the front-of-pack claim, and only list products that pass that check.

No, and we say so on each guide. Removing a preservative shortens shelf life and raises contamination risk; dropping a sulfate usually means a milder surfactant used at higher dose per wash; palm-free formulas often substitute a crop with a larger land footprint per tonne of oil. The honest version of the advice names the cost of the substitute as well as the benefit.

Whenever a regulator moves — an EU Cosmetics Regulation annex update, a US state cosmetics act such as California AB 496, or an ECHA restriction proposal — we update the affected guide and the regulation line inside it. Certification data behind the product screens is refreshed on the same cycle as our product scores.