Is coconut oil comedogenic? Rated 4 on published lists

Coconut oil carries a rating of 4 out of 5 on the pore-clogging list published on this site, alongside coconut butter at the same number. It reaches labels as Cocos Nucifera Oil or as Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil, and separately it is flagged by the Malassezia rule because it is a plant oil rich in lauric acid.

This page covers what the published lists record, the three spellings the same oil hides behind, why two unrelated criteria both land on it, how the face, the body and the hair are different questions, and what the number stops being able to tell you once concentration enters the picture.

What the published lists record for coconut oil

Coconut oil is recorded at 4 out of 5 on the pore-clogging list published on this site, which holds 88 entries in the 2026-08-10 version. Coconut butter carries the same 4, lauric acid carries 4 and myristic acid 3, so several coconut-derived names are flagged independently of one another.

No regulator stands behind that number, or behind any other comedogenic rating. There is no FDA, EU or global body that certifies, audits or standardises comedogenic lists, every circulating list is a private compilation, and published versions contradict each other on individual materials. The rating above is this site’s summary of published lists, printed in full beside the tool that uses it.

The neighbouring entries are worth reading together, because a label rarely carries only one of them. The table covers every coconut-derived name in this site’s two vocabularies.

That last row is the one people are most often surprised by, since it is derived from the same nut. Fractionated coconut oil has had the longer chains removed, which is why it arrives under a different INCI name and is judged by both vocabularies as a different material.

Three spellings, one oil, and why string matching fails

Coconut oil appears on labels in at least three forms: Coconut Oil, Cocos Nucifera Oil, and Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil with the common name glossed in brackets. A checker that compares strings exactly will match whichever form its dictionary happens to hold and silently pass over the other two.

A rating of 4 is useless if the checker never recognises the name. Most of the accuracy in an ingredient tool sits in the reading step, not in the list it reads against.

This site stores all three forms against one entry and normalises the input before matching, so the answer does not depend on which carton a marketing team wrote. Normalisation also strips the typographic dashes, footnote daggers and stray asterisks that survive a copy-paste from a retailer’s product page.

The bracket itself needs a decision rule, and getting it wrong destroys the line entirely. The parser splits on one test: a comma inside the brackets means a nested list, as on a food label, while no comma means the brackets gloss the name beside them, as on an INCI label. Without that test, Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil shatters into three entries that do not exist, and the count of recognised lines — the number every result rests on — stops meaning anything.

There is a case the normalisation still cannot solve, and it is reported rather than guessed at. A label reading only Vegetable Oil or Plant Oil Blend names no species, so it cannot be matched to coconut oil or to anything else. Those lines land in the not-recognised column, which is a statement about the label, not about the product.

Two criteria, one oil, no shared logic

Coconut oil is flagged twice on this site for reasons that have nothing to do with each other. The comedogenic rating of 4 comes from membership of a published list; the Malassezia flag comes from a rule about fatty-acid chain length, since coconut oil is dominated by lauric acid at C12 and myristic acid at C14, both inside the roughly C11 to C24 range.

Those two screens answer different questions and can disagree about other ingredients entirely. Squalane is on neither. Isopropyl myristate is on both. Mineral oil is flagged by one published comedogenic list and held out of the Malassezia rule as a material carrying no fatty acids at all. Coconut oil is simply the clearest case where both happen to land.

If the concern is uniform itchy papules rather than blackheads and closed comedones, the fungal acne safe checker applies that chain-length rule and prints its seven patterns and eighteen exceptions on the same page as the tool. Neither screen identifies a condition; that distinction belongs to a clinician examining skin.

Face, body and hair are three different questions

The comedogenic scale was built as a proxy for facial follicles, so a rating carried onto the body or into hair is being asked a question it was never designed to answer. Body skin has follicles too, and hair products transfer onto the hairline, forehead, neck and back through hands and a pillowcase, which is where the practical question actually lives.

Hair use is the most common blind spot. An oil applied only to the lengths still reaches the face by way of hands, a hood, a headband and eight hours on a pillowcase, so an elimination trial that covers face products only can run for weeks and never touch the variable that changed.

What a rating of 4 leaves out

A rating of 4 was produced by applying a material at or near full strength, so it cannot describe a formula holding two per cent of the same oil near the bottom of an ingredient list. The scale also predates most modern textures, and it says nothing about who is reading it.

Ingredient order is the closest thing to a concentration signal a label gives away. Coconut oil in the first three names is doing structural work in the formula; the same name after the fragrance allergens is present in traces. The published list cannot see that difference, and how the 0–5 scale was produced sets out why the numbers carry no concentration information at all.

The reverse case is just as instructive. Shea butter, rated 0 is widely assumed to be pore-clogging and sits at the bottom of the published scale, which is why this site keeps zero-rated entries in the reference instead of quietly dropping them.

Testing coconut oil against your own skin

An ingredient list narrows the candidates; only a trial tells you anything about your own face. The point of the list is to cut thirty names down to the two or three worth changing, so the trial has a single variable in it rather than a whole shelf.

1. Step 1

   Find every coconut-derived name first

   Check the whole routine, including hair products and cleansers, for the five names in the table above. People usually find more than one.

2. Step 2

   Note where the name sits in the order

   Third from the top and third from the bottom are different products. Record the position, because that is the only proportion signal a label offers.

3. Step 3

   Change one product, then leave it alone

   Skin turnover means a fair trial runs for four to six weeks. Dropping three products at once produces a result you cannot attribute to any of them.

4. Step 4

   Include the transfer routes

   A hair oil, a pillowcase and a hand cream all reach the face. A trial that covers only face products can miss the thing that changed.

The pore-clogging ingredients checker runs that first step in your browser against the same 86-entry list printed on that page, and reports how many lines it could not read instead of quietly calling a product clean.

Where this check is the wrong tool

A published-list check tells you that a name belongs to a set. It cannot tell you what a jar will do to your face, and treating a rating of 4 as a verdict is the same overreach as ignoring it completely, only pointed the other way.

What this page will not tell you

This page does not say that any named product from any named brand will break you out. That would be a claim about a specific company’s goods, and no page on this site makes one. It reports what published lists record about an ingredient, and where those lists disagree it says so.

It is also not medical advice, and nothing here diagnoses anything. Persistent, painful or scarring breakouts belong with a dermatologist, who can tell comedonal acne apart from Malassezia folliculitis and from rosacea — three conditions with different management that an ingredient list cannot distinguish between. The other entries in the skincare ingredient hub follow the same rule.