Make a safe choice – Suntribe scores on INCI Beauty & Yuka
By Hanna Oltmanns – September 17, 2024
Beauty apps like INCI Beauty and Yuka provide a simple and effective way to evaluate the safety and quality of cosmetic products. They guide you through the complex regulations of the beauty industry, helping you make informed decisions when selecting products that are both effective and safe for your health and well-being.
INCI Beauty and Yuka are among the leading apps in Europe for assessing the safety and quality of cosmetic products, though they are not the only ones. Apps such as Think Dirty and EWG Skin Deep are also highly regarded. In this article, however, we will focus exclusively on INCI Beauty and Yuka to provide a more profound understanding of their functionalities and our reasons for collaborating with them.
Why should you care about beauty app ratings?
Making good choices as a consumer in the beauty industry can be overwhelmingly complicated if you do not hold a degree in chemistry. Evaluating ingredient lists, safety standards, the newest research on certain ingredients and a product’s effectiveness can be difficult to navigate if you are not an expert in the field.
This is where INCI Beauty and Yuka come in to simplify your life and help you choose the right products. Both apps enable you to make informed and conscious consumer choices while helping us at Suntribe visualize the safety of our products and the components we use. At Suntribe, we are committed to using 100% natural ingredients, and these independent safety ratings support and verify the effectiveness and non-toxicity of our sunscreens.
How do beauty apps work?
INCI Beauty and Yuka are designed to simplify the process of understanding cosmetic ingredients. By scanning the barcode of a product, both apps provide you with an instant assessment of its safety and effectiveness based on the ingredient list.
On INCI Beauty, each product receives an overall score ranging from 0 to 20. Ingredients are identified using a colour-coded system of flowers, ranging from green to red. Essentially, the more red in the flower, the more problematic the ingredient is considered, and conversely, more green indicates a safer ingredient.
Yuka’s algorithm evaluates cosmetic products with a score out of 100, reflecting the safety and health impacts of the ingredients. Each ingredient is assigned a score ranging from green to red, which is then summarized in an overall score of the product itself.
What do the colours mean?
A product’s rating is being visualized by a colour system. While Yuka rates products out of 100 with a focus on overall health impact and colours ranking from Risk-free to Hazardous, INCI Beauty scores out of 20, emphasizing both a product’s ingredient safety and environmental impact. Here, the colour system reveals penalties of different degrees of intensity assigned to ingredients and used in the calculation of product ratings.
Both apps are constantly evolving, and ingredients may switch from one colour to another as the knowledge and research of different components changes.
For more information on the cosmetic analysis on both apps, check out their websites:
What does a lion have to do with cosmetic safety ratings?
When it comes to cosmetics, understanding the difference between “danger” and “risk” is key. Picture a lion: it’s naturally dangerous, but the risk it poses changes based on the situation. A zookeeper entering the lion’s cage is at much greater risk than a visitor safely watching from behind glass. This idea helps explain how beauty apps rate cosmetic products. INCI Beauty uses coloured flowers to show how “dangerous” an ingredient might be, but the actual risk to you depends on things like how the product is used, the amount of the ingredient, and who’s using it.
Yuka takes this a step further by looking at both the danger and the overall health impact of the ingredients, giving you a fuller picture of the risks. Both apps work to ensure their ratings reflect not just the potential dangers, but the actual risks you might face when using these products.
How are the scores being calculated?
When INCI Beauty and Yuka calculate scores for cosmetic products, they take an in-depth and balanced approach. Instead of just labelling ingredients as “good” or “bad,” these apps use a system that considers the potential risks of each ingredient without being overly harsh. For example, if an ingredient is suspected of being an endocrine disruptor, the product doesn’t automatically get a terrible score. Instead, it’s penalized in a way that reflects the level of concern, not just a blanket judgment.
Both INCI Beauty and Yuka also consider how many potentially risky ingredients are in a product, how much of each ingredient is used, and the “cocktail effect” — the idea that multiple ingredients can have a bigger impact together than alone. When multiple ingredients are combined, they can interact with each other and have a stronger or different impact than when they are used alone. The beauty apps take this into account, recognizing that the combined effect of several ingredients might increase the overall risk.
Plus, factors like whether a product has organic certifications or where certain ingredients are listed can add bonuses or penalties to the final score. This method ensures that the ratings you see are fair and give a realistic picture of the product’s safety.
What scores do Suntribe products have?
On Yuka, Suntribe products have ratings ranging from 68 to 100. Our natural cosmetic products have a safety rating of 100 / 100. When it comes to our sunscreens, this rating ranges from 83 for our Active SPF 50 sunscreen to 93 for our SPF 30 sunscreens.
This change in scores is related to recent updates of the danger level of Zinc Oxide, which we are using as a mineral UV filter. The way Zinc Oxide is classified is why our safety ratings have changed in the past year, yet our products have remained exactly the same.
Since the beginning of 2024, both INCI Beauty and Yuka no longer differentiate between Nano and Non-Nano Zinc Oxide, grouping them as one and therefore labelling all products containing Zinc Oxide as if it was used in its nano form. This can be quite misleading to consumers, as it is important to know that they are not the same.
In our blog article “The Ultimate Guide to Non-Nano Uncoated Zinc Oxide,” we explain the difference between Zinc Oxide in Nano and Non-Nano form in detail and why we at Suntribe use Non-Nano Zinc Oxide only. The main difference is that nanoparticles can be absorbed into the bloodstream and have been traced in human urine. They therefore bear a much greater risk than non-nano particles, which do not penetrate the skin and hold no danger of entering into the body’s systems. Currently, Non-Nano Zinc Oxide has been shown to be the safest option of UV filter to use for human health and marine life.
On INCI Beauty, Suntribe products rate from a minimum of 16.3 all the way up to 20 and our whole range has been labelled with a green badge in the overall rating, the highest possible rating.
Making informed choices when deciding which products you allow on your skin is key to wholesome well-being. Thanks to advanced technology and beauty apps, this is now easier than ever, and should you still be unsure whether a specific product meets your needs and standards, you can always get in touch with the brand and ask.
Should you ever have any questions about our products, their ingredients, safety, and beauty app ratings, you are welcome to reach out anytime! Simply contact us at contact@suntribesunscreen.com.
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about the author
Hej, I’m Hanna. I love the outdoors and I am the first one to enjoy every beam of sunshine possible. Through traveling several countries over the past few years, I have become more and more aware of the great need for sustainability in every aspect of our daily life. Through working with Suntribe I am joining the movement of sustainable production of organic cosmetic and help to raise awareness about the issue of harmful chemicals in personal care products for humans and nature alike.
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