How to read a skincare ingredient list

Under US cosmetic labeling rules, ingredients present at more than 1 percent must be listed in descending order of predominance. Ingredients at 1 percent or less may follow in any order. So the top of the list tells you what the product mostly is; the bottom tells you what is present in small amounts, without ranking them.

On AuraAnn Mineral Cream, water, safflower seed oil, and glycerin lead the list. That is what you would expect from a moisturizing cream. Zinc gluconate, copper gluconate, and magnesium aspartate appear near the end, which tells you they are minor ingredients by weight. We do not publish their exact percentages.^ART-01

When a product is marketed under an over-the-counter drug monograph, its active ingredient is declared separately with its percentage and its permitted use. AuraAnn Mineral Cream declares colloidal oatmeal 1 percent as a skin protectant. Everything else, including the minerals, is an inactive ingredient in that framework. That is a labeling category, not a comment on whether an ingredient matters.

An ingredient list does not tell you how a product performs. It does not tell you the form or quality of an ingredient beyond its name, and it does not tell you how the ingredients interact in the finished formula. It is a statement of what is in the jar, and that is all we ask it to be.

We print the whole list because people with reactive skin read labels, and because the alternative, hiding behind a blend name, would ask you to trust us instead of the label. We would rather earn that the slow way.