How FFN Categorizes Ingredients
We sort about 30,000 cosmetic ingredients into 13 groups: Essential Oils, EU Allergens, Parabens, Sulfates, Formaldehyde-Releasers, and others. This lets you filter products by category instead of one ingredient at a time.
How it works
We extract each product's ingredient list from its label or from manufacturer data. We match every ingredient against a database of known cosmetic ingredients and assign it to the relevant categories.
The matching is software-driven and AI-assisted. I oversee the data and fix what needs fixing.
Turn on a category like Essential Oils, and we hide every product whose ingredient list contains any essential oil. Exclude a single ingredient and we hide every product containing it. Use both: a product is hidden if it matches any category you've chosen or any specific ingredient on your no-go list.
Where the data comes from
Ingredient names follow standard INCI naming. Categories draw from the EU Cosmetic Regulation's allergen schedule and from published research on contact sensitizers.
What we don't claim
FFN is not 100% accurate. Labels miss ingredients. Manufacturers update formulas without updating labels. Our categorizations are sometimes wrong. You still have to read the label yourself and decide what's safe for you. People react to ingredients no platform tracks, to ingredients at concentrations no platform measures, and to combinations no platform can predict.
FFN narrows the field. Your judgment does the rest.
Found a categorization that looks wrong? Email [email protected] and tell me. I read every report.
Who builds this
I'm Karl Steele, and I built FFN. My mother has lived with MCS (multiple chemical sensitivities) for over forty years. Every "fragrance-free" product that wasn't actually fragrance-free betrayed her trust, and nothing existed to catch them before they came home. I built FFN to give our community the tools they needed.