Free-from labels checked on 2,816 products

Shops love little labels. 🏷️ "Fragrance-free." "Paraben-free." "Vegan." They sit right next to the product name.

The ingredient list sits on the same page. So PERBETE asked a simple question: do the two agree?

What did PERBETE check? 🔍

PERBETE's catalogue holds 39,310 skincare products. 3,261 of them carry at least one free-from or vegan label from the shop, out of the six in the table below.

The checker read each label. Then it read that product's ingredient list, one name at a time, and held it up to a written rule for that label.

For 2,816 products, the list was clear enough to check. The others had no list, or too many names the checker can't match yet. The checker left those out. 🙅

Which labels matched the list? 📊

Good news first: most labels matched. 🎉 Paraben-free and sulfate-free were right almost every time.

Two labels missed the most. Fragrance-free missed about 1 in 6 times, and silicone-free about 1 in 7.

One product can carry more than one label, so the rows add up to more than 3,261.

Each label has its own rule. In PERBETE's check, sulfate-free means no foaming cleansers like sodium lauryl sulfate. Salts like magnesium sulfate don't count. 🧴

Alcohol-free means no drying alcohol, like alcohol denat. Waxy fatty alcohols like cetyl alcohol aren't the drying kind.

Reference: Jones, 2020

How can a fragrance-free product list fragrant oils? 👃

Only 32 of the 133 lists named fragrance itself, like Fragrance, Parfum or Aroma. 😮

91 listed an essential oil instead. Think orange peel oil, bergamot oil or lavender oil. Essential oils are fragrance too, just the natural kind.

Reference: Jones, 2020

The EU keeps a list of scent ingredients that must be named on the label once there's more than a tiny bit. It has single molecules like limonene and linalool. It also has whole plant oils and extracts, like lavender oil and rose extract. 🌿

Reference: European Commission, 2023

The last 10 lists named a lavender or rose extract from that EU list, or just one scent molecule, like vanillin.

So what rule did PERBETE use? Fragrance-free means no fragrance, no essential oil, and none of the scent ingredients the EU makes labels name. That's stricter than "no perfume added".

Shops don't all mean the same thing by "fragrance-free". So the checker writes its rule down and shows what it found.

What does silicone-free miss? 🫧

86 lists named a silicone, most often dimethicone. Silicones feel smooth and slippy. Their names often end in -methicone or -siloxane.

13 lists named only coated silica, most often silica dimethyl silylate. That's tiny bits of silica with a silicone-made coat. PERBETE counts it, to be careful. Some people wouldn't. 🤷

What about vegan labels? 🐝

A list can't show everything vegan means. It can show one thing: is there an ingredient that comes from an animal?

55 lists named one. Most often it was a kind of collagen, like hydrolyzed collagen. A few named beeswax or lanolin, the wax from sheep's wool.

19 more named something that's usually made from animals but can be made other ways too. The checker marks those "check needed", not "doesn't match". ⚖️

Which labels can't a list prove? 🐰

Some labels just can't be checked from a list. Cruelty-free is about animal testing, and an ingredient list doesn't say how a product was tested. That label sat on 1,381 products in PERBETE's October 15 count.

Gluten-free (800), oil-free (481), phthalate-free (215) and talc-free (80) don't have a PERBETE rule yet, so the checker says nothing about them for now. 🙅

How can you check your own products? 🔎

Paste any ingredient list into the ingredient checker. Every ingredient gets a word, and most get a color too.

The checker reads the list the shop printed. A box on a store shelf might carry a newer list. When the two differ, the box in your hand wins. 📦

A label is a promise in a few words. The ingredient list is the long version. Read both!