Ingredients
How to read an ingredient list
INCI lists are legally precise and almost deliberately unhelpful. Here is how to get something useful out of one.
By The Nordic Lux Edit · · 8 min read
Every cosmetic sold in most of the world carries an INCI list — International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients. It is a standardised naming system, which is genuinely useful, and it is written in a register that puts most people off immediately, which is not.
Order tells you a great deal
Ingredients are listed in descending order of concentration down to one percent. After that, they can appear in any order. This single rule does most of the work: if an ingredient a product is named after appears after the preservative, there is very little of it in there.
What the first five usually are
Water, a humectant such as glycerin, an emollient, an emulsifier and a thickener. This is not a sign of a cheap formula — it is what a stable cream is made of. Interesting formulation happens in the space after that, not before it.
The most useful habit is a boring one: when something works for you, read its list and note what it has in common with the last thing that worked. Patterns emerge faster than you would expect.