How we score

PlainBody rates personal-care products on what is actually in them, with one transparent rubric applied to everything. The point is not to scare you. It is to separate real, cited concern from marketing, in both directions.

The PlainScore

Every product earns a score out of 100, built from three parts. We show the breakdown on each product so you can check the math.

Concern 55 points: How much genuine, evidence-backed concern the ingredients carry, weighted by how much of each is likely present (its place in the list) and whether the product stays on the skin or rinses off. Concern above a low level is reserved for real hazards: established sensitizers and irritants, EU-restricted actives, formaldehyde-releasers, and fragrance allergens.
Transparency 20 points: Whether the full ingredient list, and any fragrance, are actually disclosed. An undisclosed fragrance blend hides its allergens, so it costs points.
Formulation restraint 25 points: Needless irritant or allergen load for the product type. A clean, purposeful formula scores well without any free-from theater.

Where our concern ratings come from

Every rating is cited to authoritative reviews: the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, the EU Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety, the EU CosIng database, and the FDA. We do not use EWG-style hazard scores, which the scientific community has widely criticized. When the published evidence does not support a fear, we say so plainly, even when the internet disagrees; parabens, most sulfates, silicones, fatty alcohols, and mineral oil are good examples. That verdict is a reading of the evidence, not a personal guarantee: any ingredient can irritate someone, so patch test anything new.

The dose makes the poison

This is the oldest rule in toxicology, and it is where most ingredient-fear goes wrong. A substance can be hazardous in principle and still pose little risk at the amount and the way you actually meet it. The same molecule that is alarming in a concentrated lab study can be unremarkable at the fraction of a percent used to preserve a lotion. Hazard is what a thing could do; risk is what it is likely to do at a real dose and a real exposure. They are not the same, and scoring an ingredient by its scariest possible property, ignoring dose and exposure entirely, is the flaw we built this rubric to avoid.

So PlainScore weights concern by dose and exposure rather than treating a name on a label as a verdict:

Where it sits in the list. Ingredients are listed in rough order of how much is present, so something near the top counts far more than something near the bottom.
The 1% line. Below roughly one percent, order stops meaning anything and the amounts are tiny, so trace ingredients are weighted right down instead of flagged as if they were the main event.
Leave-on versus rinse-off. A surfactant you wash off in seconds is a different exposure from a cream you leave on all day, so a potential irritant carries less weight in a product that rinses away.

The honest limitation: brands almost never publish exact percentages, so an ingredient's position is a proxy for its concentration, not a measurement. We say that plainly rather than implying a precision we do not have. It is still far closer to how safety bodies actually reason, which is always about a level of use, than a single fixed score pinned to an ingredient no matter how little of it is there or how briefly it touches your skin.

The full version, with examples, is in our guide The dose makes the poison.

Our network

PlainBody and SerumTruth are run by the same independent team. The two sites share a method (evidence over hype) but score different things, and neither score is ever influenced by the other, or by any brand. Where a product or an active appears on both sites, we link the two reads: PlainBody covers whether anything in it is genuinely worth avoiding; SerumTruth covers whether the formula is likely to work. Visit SerumTruth ↗.

What we do not do

We do not call ingredients toxic or dangerous as if it were settled fact. We do not sell fear. This is cosmetic information about ingredients and their appearance-level effects, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for a doctor or dermatologist. If you react to a product, stop using it and talk to a professional.

Think we got a rating wrong? Tell us: hello@plainbody.com. Updated July 2026.