Comedogenic Ingredient Checker

Comedogenic ratings database

Every ingredient the checker recognises, with its comedogenic rating, whether it feeds malassezia, and where the rating actually comes from. Filter the table to look up a single ingredient.

What the 0–5 scale actually measures

The comedogenicity scale runs from 0 (no observed pore-clogging) to 5 (strongly comedogenic). Most of the published values trace back to work done in the 1970s and 1980s, largely using the rabbit-ear assay, in which an ingredient is applied to the inner ear of a rabbit at or near full strength and the follicles are examined for comedone formation.

That method has two limitations worth understanding before you act on a number. Rabbit follicles are more reactive than human ones, so the assay tends to overstate risk. And ingredients were tested neat, whereas in a real product the same ingredient might be present at two percent alongside a dozen others. This is why an ingredient rated 4 or 5 is a reason to patch-test rather than a reason to panic — and why this checker weights every match by its position in the list.

Comedogenic is not the same as fungal-acne safe

Fungal acne is not acne. It is an overgrowth of Malassezia, a yeast that lives on everyone's skin and feeds on specific lipids. It presents as small, uniform, itchy bumps, often across the forehead, chest or back, and it does not improve with benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid the way ordinary acne does.

The ingredients that feed malassezia are a different set from the ones that clog pores. As a rule of thumb from the dermatology literature, esters, polysorbates and free fatty acids in the C11–C24 range feed it, while squalane, mineral oil and petrolatum do not. The two axes disagree often enough that checking only one is misleading:

• Caprylic/capric triglyceride — rated 1 for pore-clogging, but a well-known fungal-acne trigger.
• Mineral oil — long assumed to be pore-clogging, yet it rates low in human testing and is malassezia-safe.
• Polysorbate 60 — rated 0 for pore-clogging, still feeds malassezia.
• Squalane — one of the few emollients that is genuinely safe on both axes.

How to use the result

Treat a flagged ingredient as a hypothesis, not a diagnosis. If a product breaks you out, the breakdown tells you which ingredients are the plausible suspects and roughly how much of each is likely present. If a product works for you, a high rating somewhere down the list is not a reason to stop using it. Skin responses are individual, and the only reliable test is your own patch test over two to four weeks.

If bumps are small, uniform and itchy rather than varied and inflamed, check the malassezia column first — that pattern points to fungal acne, and the usual acne actives will not help.