Will it clog your pores?
Copy the INCI list off any bottle, box, or retailer page and we'll check every ingredient against the classic comedogenic ratings table — flagging anything rated 2 to 5 for pore-clogging potential, and telling you honestly what those decades-old ratings can and can't prove about a finished formula.
Comedogenic ratings come from decades-old assays — individual ingredients, pure and at high concentration, applied to rabbit ears and later human backs. A rating is a screening heuristic, not a formula verdict: concentration, the full formulation, and your own skin decide, and a product carrying one 3-rated ingredient at 1% is not automatically pore-clogging. Want the whole label explained, not just the pore flags? Run it through the Ingredient Decoder. Itchy, uniform bumps that ignore acne treatment are a different problem — that's the fungal acne checker's job.
Flagged ingredients
Rated 2–5 on the comedogenic scaleThese ingredients simply don't appear on the comedogenic reference table — which covers the most-cited offenders, not every ingredient ever studied. "Not on the list" means no known flag, not a certified non-clogger.
Automated read of a pasted label — educational, not medical advice. Acne-prone with breakouts that persist no matter what you buy? Comedonal acne has real, well-studied treatments: start with our acne severity check and the acne therapy guide.
Paste a list above (it checks the moment you paste) or hit “Try an example.” Nothing is uploaded and nothing is saved — the whole check runs in your browser.
- Natural & BotanicalThe Seed-Oil Panic Jumped From Your Diet to Your Face. The Chemistry Doesn't Follow.Topically, the molecule the argument tells you to avoid is one the stratum corneum is structurally built from — and in acne-prone skin the documented finding is a shortage of it.
- Natural & BotanicalFour Plant Butters, One Job, Very Different Outcomes on a FaceNatural formulators swap shea, cocoa, mango and murumuru as though they were interchangeable. One carries roughly ten times the non-fat material of the others, and one is functionally a wax.
- K-BeautyK-Beauty Is Sold on Hydration. Its Best Work Is Arguably on Oily Skin.The dewy-layering marketing reads as a warning if you are congested — and it is hiding the strongest mass-market lineup anywhere for exactly that skin.
- Clean Beauty & Marketing'Hypoallergenic' Means Whatever the Brand Decided It MeansA federal court struck down the only attempt to define it — not because the science was wrong, but because nobody could prove what shoppers thought the word meant.
How the checker works
The checker splits your pasted INCI list into individual ingredients and runs each one against the curated comedogenic ratings table from the DermApproved ingredient knowledge base — the same hazard data behind our Ingredient Decoder and the product database. Matching is word-boundary aware and deliberately conservative: ethylhexylglycerin will never trip a glycerin-family entry, laureth-40 will never match laureth-4, and botanical INCI names like Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil resolve to the same entry as their plain-English twins. Anything rated 2 to 5 is flagged with its score; everything else is reported honestly as "not on the list" — no known flag, which is not the same thing as proven safe.
The ratings themselves deserve context. They descend from comedogenicity assays run mostly in the 1970s and 80s — single ingredients at high concentration on rabbit ears, later on human backs — so they grade raw materials, never finished formulas. Concentration, the delivery system, and your own skin decide whether a flagged ingredient actually matters: plenty of people use 4-rated ingredients without a single clogged pore, and plenty break out from products that check out clean here. If persistent breakouts are the reason you're reading ingredient lists at all, comedonal acne has genuinely effective treatments — gauge where you stand with the acne severity check, then see the acne therapy guide. And if the bumps are small, uniform, and itchy, run the list through the fungal acne checker instead — that's a different organism with a different fix.
Common questions
How does the pore-clogging ingredients checker work?
It splits your pasted INCI list into individual ingredients and compares each one against a curated table of comedogenic ratings — the same hazard data that powers our full Ingredient Decoder. Matching is word-boundary aware, so ethylhexylglycerin never trips a glycerin-family flag and laureth-40 never matches laureth-4, and anything rated 2 or higher is surfaced with its score.
What is the comedogenic rating scale, exactly?
Ratings run from 0 (unlikely to clog pores) to 5 (highly likely), assigned decades ago by applying individual ingredients — pure, at far higher concentrations than any finished formula uses — to rabbit ears and later human backs, then counting the microcomedones that formed. The scale was built to screen raw materials, not to grade finished products, which is why a rating should start a conversation rather than end one.
Is coconut oil comedogenic?
On the classic scale it scores a 4 out of 5, and lauric acid — its dominant fatty acid — carries a similar flag, so raw coconut oil on acne-prone facial skin is a genuinely risky bet. A formula that includes a small amount of a coconut-derived ingredient is a different situation from massaging in the pure oil, though; dose and the rest of the formulation still decide the outcome.
Should I stop using a product because one ingredient scored a 3?
Not automatically. The assays behind these ratings tested ingredients alone and undiluted, and a 3-rated ester at 1% in a well-built moisturizer may never trouble your pores. A smarter response is a jawline patch test for a week or two — if you are acne-prone and the product is a leave-on, that is where the real answer comes from.
My list came back clean — does that mean the product can’t break me out?
No — clean here only means nothing in your list appears on the comedogenic reference table, which covers the most-cited offenders rather than every ingredient ever studied. Breakouts also happen for reasons no ingredient table can see: occlusion, fragrance sensitivity, Malassezia overgrowth, or plain hormonal acne. If breakouts persist no matter what you use, that pattern belongs in front of a dermatologist, not another shopping cart.