Pore-clogging ingredients checker: comedogenic list

This pore-clogging ingredients checker, sometimes called a pore clogger checker or comedogenic checker, matches a skincare ingredient list against a published list of 86 entries that comedogenicity testing rated 1 or higher. It reports what matched, what it recognised and did not match, and what it could not read at all — the part most acne checkers leave out.

What the three answers mean

A checker that only says found or not found is hiding its own gaps. If four names out of thirty-two fail to match and the tool still prints “nothing found”, you have been handed a statement about your product that is really a statement about the tool’s vocabulary.

Not recognised does not mean safe. It means the checker has nothing to say, and saying nothing is the honest answer when the alternative is a guess presented as a result.

Why names fail to match

Ingredient labels are not written for machines. The same material shows up as Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil on one carton and Coconut Oil on the next, and a checker that compares strings exactly will catch one and miss the other. This page normalises both, along with typographic dashes, footnote daggers and the stray asterisks that survive a copy-paste from a retailer’s site.

Three cases stay genuinely unresolvable, and the checker reports them rather than papering over them. Trade names such as a branded peptide complex correspond to several INCI entries at once and cannot be expanded without the manufacturer’s disclosure. Truncated names — a label reading Sodium Sulfate where the formula contains Sodium Laureth Sulfate — could mean either material. Broad botanical terms cover dozens of distinct extracts under one word.

The comedogenic rating, and what it is worth

The 0–5 scale traces back to testing on rabbit ear tissue, which reacts more readily than human facial skin. It also measures ingredients in isolation, usually at full strength, which is not how anyone encounters them. The same material can rate 4 neat and about 1 when it forms a small part of a finished formula.

That is why this page reports the rating beside each match instead of rolling everything into a single score. A single score would imply a precision the underlying data does not have. Where the 0–5 scale comes from covers the testing history and why two reputable lists can contradict each other on the same ingredient.

Ingredients people ask about individually have their own pages — coconut oil and isopropyl myristate are the two that appear most often in a flagged result, and dimethicone is the one most often assumed to be flagged when it is not.

A different question: fungal acne

Pore-clogging and Malassezia-triggering are separate lists answering separate questions, and an ingredient can be on one and not the other. Squalane is a good example: it is not on the pore-clogging list, and it is also not a Malassezia trigger, while most plant oils are triggers regardless of their comedogenic rating.

If the concern is folliculitis rather than comedones, use the fungal acne safe checker — it applies a stated rule about fatty-acid chain length rather than matching a list, and the rule is written out on that page.

The full list this page matches against

Below is every ingredient the checker above can flag, with its rating and its job in a formula. Entries rated 0 are held in the reference deliberately — shea butter and argan oil are widely assumed to be pore-clogging and are rated 0 on published lists, so flagging them would confirm a myth with our own tool. The one jojoba entry is sulfated jojoba oil, a modified material; plain jojoba oil and its 0–2 grade are not on the list.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you whether a named product from a named brand will break you out. That would be a claim about a specific company’s goods, and this site does not make those. The checker only ever reads text you paste in yourself, the result is generated in your browser, and it is never stored or published.

It is also not medical advice. Persistent or painful breakouts are worth taking to a dermatologist, who can tell comedonal acne apart from fungal folliculitis and from rosacea — three conditions with different treatments that an ingredient list cannot distinguish between.

Pregnancy is a separate question again, with its own cited lists rather than a comedogenic one: the pregnancy skincare checker flags what the American Academy of Dermatology lists to avoid or to limit.