The standards behind every grade, ranking and citation on this site.
Four things reorder a best-of list — the catalogue grows, a formula changes, the evidence shifts, or the engine does — and publishing that churn is more honest than freezing a page and letting it quietly rot.
It would be the most-clicked number on this site and one of the least defensible — because the data underneath it was never designed to grade a finished product.
A real mechanism, a 1976 culture experiment, a community spreadsheet and no regulator anywhere — here is exactly how much weight that badge on the bottle can carry.
The percentage on the front of the bottle is the number readers most want us to rank on, and the one number our scoring system deliberately refuses to treat as a measure of strength.
An ingredient list is a legal document with a rule most readers don't know they're reading — and past a certain point on the label, the order stops meaning anything at all.
A well-formed identifier pointing at the wrong paper doesn't merely fail — it manufactures authority. So we check the destination, mechanically, before anything ships.
The 'medically reviewed by' badge is the cheapest credibility signal in health publishing, and almost never says what was reviewed, when, or against what — so we cite the guideline instead and let you check it.
Almost every claim on a skincare box traces back to one study, and the distance between what that study measured and what the label says is where the entire industry lives.
The same two words get attached to a twelve-person unblinded study and to a Cochrane review — so we stopped grading ingredients and started grading ingredient-and-claim pairs.
A single overall score is a category error — fitness is relative to the problem, and the moment you change the question, the answer has to move with it.
The weights are published, the arithmetic is identical for every product, and none of it asks you to take our word for anything — which is the entire point.
Your profile, diaries and progress photos sit in your own browser, which deletes an entire category of risk and hands you one job no server is doing for you.
Personalisation here doesn't fetch you a secret list of products — it changes which true sentence sits at the top of a page that says the same thing to everyone.
A number you can't interpret is decoration. Here is the anatomy of the page — what each figure is built from, which parts a machine computed, which parts a person wrote, and the one signal most people read as a footnote when it belongs beside the headline.
A luxury LED eye mask posts a flawless irritation-risk score. So does an inexpensive cleanser that actually works. Only one of those facts tells you anything — and the difference is the whole point.
A luxury-tier moisturiser can score well on value while a drugstore cleanser lands on the floor. Once you see how the ratio is built, the sticker price stops being informative — and so does most dupe advice.
Four cleansers, star ratings within a whisker of each other, and scores spanning some thirty points. The highest scorer has a few hundred reviews; the lowest has tens of thousands. That is not an oversight; it is the entire design.