Reading INCI made easy
The ingredient list on cosmetics is called INCI and follows fixed rules. If you can read it, you'll know more about a product in thirty seconds than from any advert.
The most important rule: the order
Ingredients are generally listed in descending order of their weight at the time of manufacture. There is an exception for ingredients below 1%: they may appear in any order after the more highly concentrated ingredients. Special rules apply to colourants. If aqua comes first, water is the largest single ingredient by quantity. In many of our formulas a hydrosol comes first, meaning a plant water. Exact percentages or the effect of the finished product can't be read from the list alone.
Latin for plants, English for function
Plant ingredients carry their botanical name: Butyrospermum Parkii is shea butter, Simmondsia Chinensis is jojoba. Functional ingredients are listed in English, for example Sodium Bicarbonate for baking soda.
How to spot fragrance ingredients
Parfum refers to a fragrance composition. Individual fragrance substances may also be listed by name, for example Linalool or Limonene. In our products they can be natural components of essential oils, but their names alone don't reveal where they come from. Whether they have to be listed individually depends, among other things, on their concentration and the type of product. So if these names are missing, that doesn't automatically mean a product is fragrance-free. Check the full ingredient list and the specific information for each product.
And the glossary covers the rest
In our Ingredient glossary we explain every ingredient we use: what it is, where it comes from and what it does for your skin.
