Choose your Cosmetics more Wisely with INCI Beauty!

I used to buy beauty products for their packaging or for the brand, without really paying attention to what they contained. My reasoning was simple: if the products were sold in supermarkets or drugstores, they were obviously nontoxic and good for my skin. As you are probably guessing, I was wrong… That, I discovered when one of my close friends started scanning the barcodes of all my beauty products with an application called INCI Beauty. Since then, I too have adopted the application. 

As previously mentioned, INCI Beauty allows you to learn everything about a product’s components, simply by scanning its barcode. When you open the app, you can either choose to search for a cosmetic manually or to find it by scanning its barcode. Once the application has identified the product, it will give you the list of ingredients as well as a grade out of 20. The ingredients are given different colours according to their level of toxicity: green is considered good, yellow is satisfactory, orange not so good, and red alerts you to controversial/at risk ingredients. You can click on each ingredient to read a short description, along with possible health problems it can cause. The application also mentions when a component is regulated and when it is a suspected endocrine disruptor. And you can scan almost anything, from shampoos, to toothpaste, to eyeshadow!

But the utility of this app does not stop there: for each product, the application gives a few examples of similar but less toxic products and tells you where you can buy them. You can add products you like to your favourites and access your history at any time.  There is also a discussion section where you can write comments about the products you have tried and ask other users about their experience with a certain product. 

If you do not find the cosmetic you are looking for, you can take a picture of its barcode and list of ingredients and send it to the application to be analysed. The results usually take three to four business days to be released. 

INCI Beauty is available on both the App Store and Google Play and is accessible in five languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch). If you don’t have enough space on your phone to download it, check out ; you will be able to access the same functionalities and more!  

To support this project, you can also  or switch to premium for approximately $25/year to get rid of the ads and get analyses without scanning the barcodes.