What Cosmetic Chemists Think About Beauty Ingredient Apps (2024)

During a recent Sephora visit, I overheard two teens discussing whether or not to buy a face moisturizer. Ultimately, they decided against it after reading about one of the cream’s ingredients on the Yuka app. These ingredient apps, including Yuka, Think Dirty, the EWG’s Healthy Living and others, let users scan beauty products and packaged foods to learn more about their ingredients in real time. I’ve even seen Amazon reviewers saying they’ve returned skin-care and hair-care products after scanning them with Yuka and getting a low score. (They don’t even try the products first!) Though we can’t speak to these apps’ accuracy (or lack thereof) when it comes to ingredients in foods, we know beauty experts aren’t so enthusiastic about their use in our world. Here’s why.

Featured Experts

• Ava Perkins, a cosmetic chemist and PhD student
• Krupa Koestline, a cosmetic chemist and founder of KKT Labs
• Victoria Fu, a cosmetic chemist, cofounder of Chemist Confessions and co-author of Skincare Decoded

How Do These Ingredient Apps Work?

Apps like Yuka, Think Dirty, OnSkin and the EWG’s Healthy Living allow users to scan the barcode of a beauty or personal-care product, like shampoo for example, to see a breakdown of ingredients and their potential health threat. Yuka is currently the number-one app in the Health & Fitness category in the App Store. It gives products a score, with 100 being the best, and lists whether each ingredient in the product is hazardous, moderate-risk, low-risk or risk-free. According to Yuka, “the method to analyze cosmetic products is based on the analysis of all the ingredients of the product. Each ingredient is assigned a risk level according to the latest scientific data.” Products that contain a “hazardous” ingredient automatically receive a score below 25.

What Cosmetic Chemists Think of Ingredient Rating Apps

“Unfortunately, we do not find apps like these to be helpful in finding better—or safer—skin-care products,” says cosmetic chemist Victoria Fu. “The main issue with these platforms is that they demonize perfectly safe ingredients for serious, inflammatory claims, such as being endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, using very loosely correlating data. We find that these apps inherently create unnecessary fear of what’s in our beauty products. Honestly, we, the formulators, wouldn’t want to work with these ingredients either if they truly had these sort of red flags.”

Ava Perkins, also a cosmetic chemist, says she has strong feelings about ingredient apps, and they are not positive. “On the surface, apps like these are perceived to set the standard of ingredient safety because they provide a level of ‘transparency.’ They do so by citing scientific literature, having a board of experts, and often sharing resources for consumers to take a deep dive on. However, what each platform proves to me is that they do not have a basic understanding of assessing safety, and rarely are theirconclusions backed by relevant and applicable literature.”

“There is just so much noise out there, and fear—sadly—sells,” Fu says. “Despite our negative views of these apps, we empathize with beauty consumers who feel the need to look to these platforms for guidance. Ultimately, everyone just wants to make the right product choices for their skin. If you find yourself going down this rabbit hole and feeling very uneasy about the safety of your products, take a step back from your phone. Hear it from chemists that many of these ingredients that have been red-flagged don’t actually have substantial data to be deemed ‘unsafe.’ When you’re scrolling through social media, just remember to be wary of people who use very inflammatory, outrageous claims!”

The Biggest Issues With These Apps

The Rating System Is Flawed

“One particularly problematic issue is that the rating system is very flawed,” says Fu. “Some products can receive terrible scores on these platformsfor using proven gold standard active ingredients such as retinol. The thought of skin-care users missing out on retinol’s great wrinkle and hyperpigmentation fighting benefits because of terrible scoring from these apps makes us kind of sad.” Perkins agrees, adding that “individual ingredient ratings and overall product ratings across all the platforms are not consistent, which is confusing.” The same product may rank differently on one app versus another.

The Apps Don’t Account for Nuance

“Toxicity can’t be generalized because it is route- and dose-dependent,” Perkins explains. “Take caffeine for example: Taking 400 mg of it orally—aka drinking a few cups of coffee—will make you feel pretty jittery. But, applying 400 mg of it topically via a cream won’t make your heart feel like it’s going to race out of your chest. Additionally, everything can harm you in the right amount, even water. This is the nuance that these apps do not take into account, in my opinion. How can they deem an ingredient to be unsafe when they don’t know what the concentration of each ingredient is in a formulation? You can’t. How do the studies that inject ingredients into rats directly relate to how a consumer applies a product topically? It very often doesn’t.”

Cosmetic chemist Krupa Koestline appreciates that these apps make ingredient information more accessible, but as a product formulator, she sees kinks in the system. “I see that these apps often oversimplify complex ingredients and formulations,” she says. “The ratings can sometimes be misleading, as they don’t always consider context, such as ingredient concentrations, formulation synergies, or the role of preservatives and other necessary compounds. This can lead to unjustified fear around certain ingredients that are actually safe and effective at the appropriate levels.”

Where to Look for Ingredient Information Instead

Perkins says that if you’re interested in learning about the functions of ingredients in the products you’re using, the INCIDecoder is a sensible choice. “They also have their opinions on ingredient safety; however, I find that their main focus is education on ingredient function and not ingredient safety.” Fu agrees, adding that her and her fellow cosmetic chemist and cofounder Gloria Lu, find INCIDecoder to be a “better and more objective alternative. It’s also a great tool toscreen products for ingredients yourskin is sensitive to.”

For those looking for even more in-depth information on ingredient safety, Perkins also recommends checking out the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR). “This is an independent non-profit scientific body that assesses and reviews the safety of cosmetic ingredients,” she explains. “Their findings are not particularly easy reads though. Their reviews can sometimes be over a few hundred pages.”

Koestline says that ultimately, transparency in formulation is key. “While these apps can be a starting point, they’re no substitute for consulting qualified professionals or understanding the science behind ingredients. Apps are just one piece of the puzzle. Real product safety and efficacy lie in the formulation details, ingredient quality and the testing that reputable brands invest in.”