Reading a label: what actually matters

Ingredient lists are ordered, not ranked by usefulness. Learning to read them takes about ten minutes and saves a great deal of money.

Order tells you concentration

Ingredients appear in descending order by weight until one percent, after which the order means nothing. If the ingredient a product is named after sits below the preservatives, it is present in a trace amount.

• Anything after phenoxyethanol is usually under one percent.

• Water first is normal, not a shortcut.

• A long list is not automatically worse than a short one.

Claims that mean nothing

Dermatologically tested tells you a test happened, not what the result was. Clean, non-toxic and chemical-free have no agreed definitions. What matters is the concentration, the formulation and whether your skin agrees with it.

The label is a legal document, not a promise. Read it as one.

You do not need to memorise chemistry. You need to know where to look, and to stop trusting the front of the bottle.