Ingredient lists
Product ingredient lists come from three places, and every field records which one:
- Open Beauty Facts. A collaborative, open database of cosmetic products. Data from Open Beauty Facts is available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0. Individual contents are available under the Database Contents License. We match on barcode first.
- Brand product pages. For a limited set of top products, the ingredient string as printed on the brand’s own product page, fetched slowly and with respect for robots.txt. Never retailer pages.
- Retailer feeds. Where an affiliate feed includes the ingredient list.
Ingredient names and functions
Ingredient names are normalized against the European Commission CosIng database, which also supplies the listed function of each ingredient (humectant, emollient, and so on). CosIng is published by the European Commission; its reuse terms are on that site.
Prices, sizes, and images
From affiliate network feeds and APIs (Impact, CJ, Rakuten, FlexOffers, Awin). We do not scrape retailer sites. Product images are shown from the feed’s own URL, not copied. Each price shows the date we last checked it.
Share-alike: what we give back
Because the ODbL is a share-alike license, the ingredient data we derive from Open Beauty Facts is available under the same license. A nightly dump of our OBF-derived ingredient table (product barcode, normalized ingredient list, source) is available on request; email [email protected] and we will send the current file or a download link. We aim to publish it at a fixed URL on this page before launch. Our matching scores, routines, and price history are our own work and are not part of that dump.
What we do not have
We do not have a lab, and we do not test products. Everything on this site is derived from published ingredient lists and published prices. Where a list has not been resolved against the dictionary, the product does not appear, rather than appearing with a guess. See how we match.
Corrections
If a formula on this site is out of date, email [email protected] with the product and a photo of the current label. We check and update within a few days.