Methodology
How we evaluate skincare
This is our headline promise: a method you can check. Everyone in this category says they tested twenty products. We have not lab-tested any of them, and we say so — here is what we do instead.
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Products we claim to have lab-tested
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Sponsored placements accepted
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Free products accepted for coverage
Those zeros are the point, not a gap. We would rather publish that we haven't tested something than pretend we have. What we bring instead is a consistent, reproducible method applied the same way to every product.
1. How we source the picks
We start from what people actually search for and what Amazon actually stocks — because a recommendation you cannot buy is useless. We build a longlist from the category (the well-known products, the cult favorites, the value options), confirm each one is currently sold, and then cut it down. Nothing gets a spot because a brand asked; brands cannot buy a spot, because we accept no sponsored placements.
2. The scoring rubric
Every product is scored out of 10 against a small set of criteria chosen for the category. For a skincare product those are usually: ingredient quality and transparency, barrier support, suitability for the stated concern, texture and use, and value. For a device they are: build quality, the spec that matters most (a fridge's real capacity, a roller's cold retention), ease of use, and value. The overall score is the mean of those metric scores, shown to one decimal place. We publish the sub-scores on every card so you can see what the number is made of.
The score is a judgment from documented research — published specs, decoded ingredient lists, manufacturer documentation, and aggregated owner reviews. It is not a measurement we took in a lab, because we do not have one. This is also why you will never see an aggregate star ratingfrom us in a page's structured data: we have no customer reviews to aggregate, and inventing one would be a lie.
3. How we read an ingredient list
Skincare is unusually easy to evaluate on paper because the label is the product. We read the INCI list in order (ingredients are listed by concentration), note the actives and their likely strength, and flag the things that decide whether a product suits a concern — fragrance and essential oils for sensitive and rosacea-prone skin, the humectant/emollient/ occlusive balance for dry skin, comedogenic risk for acne-prone skin. We cite the documented function and typical concentration ranges of an active rather than inventing a percentage. Where a brand does not disclose a strength, we say the strength is undisclosed rather than guessing.
4. How prices work
Every price on this site is pulled live from the Amazon Product API and stamped with the date it was fetched. If our data is more than 48 hours old, the number disappears and the button falls back to "Check price on Amazon" — we would rather show you no number than a stale one. We never type a price into the page by hand. Amazon's price at checkout is always the one that counts.
5. The "don't buy this if" rule
Every product we recommend carries a line telling you who it is notfor. It is the fastest way we know to prove we are on your side rather than the retailer's, and no competitor page we studied does it. Every roundup also names at least one pick to skip.
6. Updates and corrections
Roundups are reviewed at least quarterly; ingredient guides twice a year. Every page shows a visible last-updated date. If we get something wrong and you tell us, we correct material errors within 48 hours and note the correction on the page. See our editorial policy for the full standards, and contact us to flag anything.