Start with the back of the bottle
Almost everything a skincare product is willing to tell you about itself is printed on the back, in a list nobody is taught to read. The front of the pack is marketing and is barely regulated. The ingredient list is a legal document, and it follows rules you can learn in about ten minutes.
Here is one, decoded. This is not a real product — it is a composite, assembled so that every case worth learning appears once. A moisturiser sold on a natural or botanical positioning would plausibly carry a list very like it.
| As printed | What it is | What the position tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Aqua | Water | First, so it is the largest single component — usually 60–80% of a lotion. "Aqua" is simply the INCI name for water; it is not a fancier water. |
| Glycerin | Humectant | Second by weight. Glycerin draws water into the outer skin layer and is one of the few ingredients whose usefulness almost nobody disputes. |
| Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride | Emollient oil | A processed coconut or palm fraction. It appears on "natural" labels constantly, and it is a manufactured ingredient made from a natural feedstock — which is the whole difficulty with the word. |
| Cetearyl Alcohol | Fatty alcohol | Not the alcohol people mean when they say a product is drying. It is a waxy solid that thickens and softens. Chemically an alcohol; behaviourally the opposite of ethanol. |
| Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea) Butter | Plant butter | Botanicals are named by Latin binomial with the common name in brackets. That convention is why ingredient lists look more alarming than they are. |
| Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Oil | Plant oil | Still above the 1% line, so present at a real concentration. |
| Cetearyl Glucoside | Emulsifier | Holds the water and the oil together. Every lotion needs one, and no lotion advertises it. |
| Niacinamide | Active | An active ingredient placed above the preservative, which suggests a concentration that trials have actually tested. Below it, the same name would tell you almost nothing. |
| Phenoxyethanol | Preservative | The most useful marker on the list. Its permitted maximum is 1%. So everything printed after it is at 1% or less — and it is worth knowing that an unpreserved water-based product is a microbiological hazard, not a purer one. |
| Sodium Hyaluronate | Humectant | Below the marker, so ≤1%. That is not damning — hyaluronates are used at fractions of a percent by design — but it is a fact the front of the pack will not mention. |
| Mel | Honey | INCI names are often Latin. "Mel" is honey. A label can carry a celebrated honey and still contain a trace of it. |
| Leptospermum Scoparium Branch/Leaf Oil | Mānuka essential oil | An essential oil, this far down the list, at a fraction of a percent — which is both how essential oils are safely used and how little of the hero ingredient is usually in there. |
| Tocopherol | Vitamin E | Frequently present to keep the oils from going rancid rather than to do anything to your skin. |
| Parfum | Fragrance | One word standing in for a mixture that may contain dozens of substances. It is the commonest cause of cosmetic contact allergy. |
| Linalool | Fragrance allergen | Named separately because it must be. It occurs naturally in lavender and in many essential oils, which is a useful reminder that "natural" and "non-allergenic" are unrelated ideas. |
| Limonene | Fragrance allergen | From citrus peel. Same rule, same point. |
| Citric Acid | pH adjuster | At this position it is almost certainly setting the pH, not exfoliating anything. |
| CI 75810 | Colourant | Colourants are listed last, by Colour Index number. CI 75810 is chlorophyllin — the green. |
Four rules do most of the work. Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, but only down to one percent; below that a manufacturer may list them in any order it likes. A preservative with a legal maximum therefore acts as a ruler laid across the list. Botanicals wear Latin names, so a list can look frightening and be gentle, or look gentle and be irritating. And colourants go at the end, out of sequence, by number.
The rest of this site is the same exercise applied to the claims on the front of the pack, and to the ingredients this address has been associated with for years — the New Zealand botanicals, where the research is more interesting, and thinner, than either the sellers or the sceptics tend to admit. The full guide to reading an ingredient list goes considerably deeper than the table above.
The guides
How to read an INCI list
The ordering rule, the one-percent line, the preservative trick, and the six places a list can mislead you without breaking any law.
What "natural" and "clean" actually mean
In New Zealand, the United States and the European Union: nothing. Here is what the private certification standards require instead, and where they stop.
Words with no legal definition
Non-comedogenic, hypoallergenic, dermatologist-tested, chemical-free, paraben-free. What each one is permitted to mean, which is less than you think.
Who regulates cosmetics in New Zealand
Not Medsafe. Cosmetics sit with the Environmental Protection Authority under a hazardous-substances statute, and the difference matters.
SPF, broad spectrum, and the sunscreen standard
New Zealand tested its sunscreens, found many missing their labelled SPF, and made the standard mandatory in 2022. What the numbers mean now.
Mānuka honey on skin
The trials are real. Almost all of them are about wounds and burns, not about faces. What that does and does not license you to conclude.
Kānuka honey and rosacea
A 138-participant randomised trial run at five New Zealand clinics, read line by line — including the parts that are less impressive than the headline.
Kawakawa balm
One of the most searched natural skincare products in New Zealand, and one of the least studied. What is actually known about the plant.
New Zealand botanicals, ingredient by ingredient
Harakeke, horopito, tōtara, kōwhai, native seaweeds and merino keratin. What has been studied, in what, and how far the findings travel.
Fragrance and essential oils
The commonest cause of cosmetic contact allergy, and the clearest case where a natural ingredient is the riskier one.
Three actives with real evidence
Retinoids, vitamin C and niacinamide: what the controlled trials measured, how large the effects were, and how long they took.
What topical skincare can and cannot do
The stratum corneum is a barrier that works. That single fact sets the ceiling on every product in your bathroom, and explains what procedures are for.
The standing refusals
It sells nothing and earns nothing from any link on it: no affiliate links, no advertising, no sponsorship, no paid mentions. It does not rate or rank products, because a reference that grades products eventually becomes a shop. Nobody here has tested any product, and no page will ever say otherwise. Where the evidence for something is thin, the page says so at the point of the claim rather than in a footnote — and every article ends with a section on what is still unknown.
One exception is worth stating on the front page rather than burying. A single article cites a commercial clinic's published treatment prices, because almost no clinic publishes any, and this site's publisher has an ownership interest in that business. The interest is disclosed in the paragraph that carries the link, no money changes hands, and it is the only link to a commercial business anywhere on the site.
How a claim gets onto a page, and what the certainty labels mean, is set out in the method. Corrections are welcome and are published: write to the editor.