Bakuchiol
Bakuchiol rates Clear, and the rating is a default rather than a verdict. We identified no comedogenicity assay of it — no rabbit ear, no human induction study, nothing in either direction. The human trials people cite when they call it non-comedogenic tested wrinkles or treated existing acne, which are different questions.
No assay we can find, and no comedogenic concern on record.
What it is
A meroterpene phenol — an aromatic ring with a hydroxyl group and a long unsaturated hydrocarbon tail — isolated from the seeds of Psoralea corylifolia, the plant known as babchi. CAS 10309-37-2, molecular formula C18H24O, molecular weight 256.38 g/mol. It is markedly lipophilic: the ECHA registration data reported in Mascarenhas-Melo and colleagues' 2024 review give an octanol-water partition coefficient of 5.09 and water solubility reported across a broad 0.1–100 mg/L range (the spread reflects different measurement conditions rather than a single precise value). It is essentially oil-soluble, and is generally carried in a lipid phase — or emulsified, solubilised or encapsulated to work around that. It is sold as a retinol alternative, and the reason is narrower than the marketing suggests. Bakuchiol has no structural relationship to vitamin A whatsoever — no retinoid skeleton, no ring system in common. The comparison rests on gene-expression profiling: Chaudhuri and Bojanowski reported in 2014 that bakuchiol up-regulates several of the same genes retinol does, including collagen types I, III and IV. That is a finding about gene expression, and "behaves like retinol in a microarray" is not the same claim as "is a retinol." The trade name "phyto retinol" is a marketing term, not a chemical one. One material-identity point matters before anything else on this page. Two different things are sold under the bakuchiol banner. The first is the purified molecule — Sytheon's Sytenol A, which the supplier states is batch-tested to at least 99.7% purity, a specification we are reporting from the company that sells it rather than from an independent assay. The second is babchi oil, sold as Psoralea Corylifolia Seed Oil, which is a whole seed extract containing bakuchiol alongside the rest of the plant's chemistry, including psoralens. These are not the same material. Neither has been assayed for comedogenicity, so the distinction does not change our answer — but it changes what is actually on the reader's face, and no chart that prints a number for "bakuchiol" says which of the two it means.
Why we rate it Clear
We rate it Clear at Low confidence, and the confidence is the honest part. Our evidence tier for this ingredient is no-assay: we found no comedogenicity assay of bakuchiol in the corpus we searched, and the rating is therefore an inference rather than a reading. The absence, stated precisely. Bakuchiol does not appear in Fulton's 1989 table — we have all 220 rows transcribed, and there is no bakuchiol row, no Psoralea row, no babchi row. It does not appear in any of the nine numeric documents that make up the comedogenicity corpus. Puyana, Chandan and Tsoukas ran a systematic review of PubMed for bakuchiol in dermatology in 2022 and retrieved thirty articles; not one of them is a comedogenicity assay. And Mascarenhas-Melo and colleagues published a 37-page comprehensive review of bakuchiol in skin in 2024 with a dedicated section titled "Safety of bakuchiol for skin: regulatory and toxicological concerns" — it covers skin irritation, sensitisation, two published contact-dermatitis case reports, hepatic metabolism, degradation in storage and aquatic ecotoxicity, and it does not use the word "comedogenic" once. We searched the full text. That is the strongest absence we can demonstrate, and it is still an absence, not a proof that no test exists anywhere. Now the chronology, and a correction to our own note. The tidy version of this page — the one we had written in our internal queue — is that a comedogenicity score for bakuchiol is chronologically impossible, because the rabbit-ear literature runs from 1968 to 1989 and bakuchiol only reached cosmetics in 2007. The first half is right and the conclusion is not. The classic assays — Kligman and Mills 1972, Kligman and Kwong 1979, Mills and Kligman 1982, Morris and Kwan 1983, Fulton 1984, Lanzet 1986, Fulton 1989 — were testing the cosmetic ingredients of their day, and bakuchiol was not one of them; it was a molecule known to natural-product chemists and to nobody else. But the corpus does not stop in 1989. Nguyen, Dang and Maibach ran a rabbit-ear panel in 2007, and Francis and Shojan ran one in 2019. Both postdate bakuchiol's arrival in skincare. Neither tested it. "We found no assay of it" and "the assay could not have been run" are different sentences, and only the first one is ours to make. The date itself deserves a caveat we have not seen printed anywhere. The 2007 figure, and the trade name Sytenol A attached to it, comes from Sytheon — the company that sells the ingredient. It is the supplier's own account of its own product launch. The peer-reviewed literature does not corroborate it: the 2024 comprehensive review gives no date at all for bakuchiol's entry into cosmetic use, and it cannot keep its own chronology straight on the molecule's discovery, saying 1966 in one section and 1973 in another, with the 1973 claim cited to a paper published in 1967. What does exist is human evidence, and it is about other things. Dhaliwal and colleagues published the trial everyone cites in the British Journal of Dermatology in 2019: 44 patients, randomised, double-blind, twelve weeks, 0.5% bakuchiol against 0.5% retinol. Its endpoints were wrinkle surface area and hyperpigmentation, read from facial photographs. Both arms improved and the retinol arm reported more scaling and stinging. Nobody in that study counted a comedone. It is a good trial and it is a photoaging trial, and it can tell you nothing about whether this molecule plugs a follicle. The nearest thing to relevant data is Brownell and colleagues, in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology in 2021 — an open-label pilot of UP256, a cream containing 0.5% bakuchiol, in 13 subjects with mild to moderate acne, enriched for Fitzpatrick skin types III–VI, applied twice daily for twelve weeks. It recorded both inflammatory and non-inflammatory lesion counts, and non-inflammatory lesions are comedones — so this study measured the thing this site is about. Its abstract reports a significant reduction in inflammatory lesions and an improvement in post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. It does not report a result for the comedone count. We have not read the results section, which is paywalled, so we cannot tell you what that number did, and we are not going to infer it from an abstract's silence. Two of its authors work for Unigen Inc., which makes UP256. A second controlled trial points the same way and has the same limit: Poláková and colleagues, in 2015, randomised 111 acne patients to adapalene plus a dermocosmetic containing bakuchiol, Ginkgo biloba extract and mannitol against adapalene plus its vehicle, and counted both inflammatory and non-inflammatory lesions. The adjunct arm did better — but it tested a multi-ingredient finished cream layered on top of a drug, so it cannot isolate what bakuchiol did, and it is a treatment trial in people who already had acne, not a test of whether bakuchiol induces comedones. And then the point that governs all of it. An acne treatment trial cannot establish that an ingredient is non-comedogenic. It enrolled people who already had acne and asked whether the acne improved. Comedogenicity asks whether a material induces follicular plugging in the skin it is applied to — a different question, a different population, a different endpoint. "It helped acne patients" and "it will not clog your pores" are two claims. Only one of them has been studied, and it is not the second one. We are rating this ingredient Clear on an absence of evidence against it, and unproven is not disproven in the reassuring direction any more than it is in the alarming one.
What the evidence doesn’t tell you
Absence of evidence is weaker than evidence of absence, and here we have only the first. No rabbit-ear assay of bakuchiol, no human comedogenicity induction study, no cyanoacrylate follicular biopsy — and the two acne treatment trials that did count non-inflammatory lesions either left that number unreported (Brownell 2021) or could not isolate bakuchiol from a multi-ingredient formula (Poláková 2015). "No signal" and "no one looked" produce the same silence, and Clear is the least-wrong call available rather than a clean bill of health. If somebody ran the assay tomorrow it could come back the other way, and we would have no grounds to be surprised. We cannot even offer the structure-activity guess we have leaned on elsewhere. Fulton's generalisation was about fatty acids and chain length — the mid-chain acids produced the most follicular keratosis in his hands, the longer ones less. Bakuchiol is not a fatty acid, not a triglyceride and not an ester. It has no position on that curve at all. And the inconvenient half of that, which we are printing because we found it. Fulton also floated an empirical hypothesis about molecular weight, suggesting the materials in the 200–300 range penetrated the follicle most readily. Bakuchiol's molecular weight is 256.38. It sits inside that window, and it is strongly lipophilic besides. If we were willing to reason mechanistically from Fulton's passage, that reasoning would point away from our own rating. We are not willing to, because that passage is a hypothesis about the ingredients in Fulton's own panel and not a law of follicular biology, and because running an untested molecule through it produces a guess. We report the arithmetic because we did it, not because it decides anything. It does not make bakuchiol comedogenic. It does mean the one mechanism-shaped fact available cuts against us, and a page that quietly omitted it would be doing exactly what this site exists to object to. There are two adverse-event reports in this literature and they deserve naming, along with a clear statement of what they are not. Malinauskiene and colleagues reported a case of allergic contact dermatitis to bakuchiol in Contact Dermatitis in 2019, positive on patch testing at 0.1%. Raison-Peyron and Dereure reported a second in the same journal in 2020: a 23-year-old woman with facial eczema traced to an eye cream, whose repeated open application test was positive from day one and showed what the authors describe as a follicular inflammatory pattern, with bakuchiol at 1% the only positive on testing. That phrase is the closest thing in the entire literature to a report of bakuchiol doing something unwanted inside a follicle, and it is not a comedogenicity finding. Allergic contact dermatitis is an immune response established by patch testing in two individuals. A follicular inflammatory pattern in a use test is not a comedone count, and neither case report counted comedones. We name them because omitting the two reports that complicate a reassuring page is the failure we are supposed to be preventing, not because they establish anything about pores. Bakuchiol is oil-soluble and cannot be delivered without a lipid phase, so a question about a "bakuchiol oil" is often a question about the carrier. The rating on this page is for the molecule. It is not a rating of whatever it has been dissolved in, and several of the carriers commonly used have ratings of their own on this site. Finally, the numbers. The figures that circulate for bakuchiol and acne — a 57% reduction in six weeks, 67% alongside 2% salicylic acid — trace to Chaudhuri and Marchio, "Bakuchiol in the management of acne-affected skin," published in Cosmetics & Toiletries in 2011. That is a trade magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal, and Chaudhuri is at Sytheon Ltd, which manufactures and sells the ingredient as Sytenol A. We are not saying those numbers are false. We are saying they have not been through peer review and that their author sells the material, and that neither fact is usually printed beside them.
Where you’ll see it
Serums and night creams sold as retinol alternatives, frequently labelled "phyto retinol" or "plant retinol," along with eye creams and some products aimed at acne-prone skin. The concentrations reported in the clinical literature are 0.5% (Dhaliwal's trial and the UP256 acne cream) and 1% (the eye cream in the 2020 contact-dermatitis case); products that declare an amount generally sit between 0.5% and 2%. On an ingredient list it appears simply as Bakuchiol. Psoralea Corylifolia Seed Oil, which is babchi oil rather than the purified molecule, is a different entry and a different material. Those percentage ranges are illustrative of what products declare, not a measured market prevalence.
Sources
Each source says what it actually is. Several widely-cited “sources” for comedogenic ratings are republishing the same 1989 assay, and counting them as independent agreement is how a thin evidence base gets made to look thick.
- Fulton JE. "Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products." J Soc Cosmet Chem 40:321–333 (1989) The rabbit-ear assay nearly every comedogenic number online descends from. Method: the ingredient at roughly 10% in propylene glycol, applied to the inner ear of three New Zealand albino rabbits, follicles scored for keratosis on a 0–5 scale, where Fulton's own key reads 0–1 "not considered significant," 2–3 "borderline," 4–5 "considered positive." Cited here purely for an absence, which we verified against a 400dpi transcription of all 220 rows of Table I: there is no bakuchiol row, no Psoralea row and no babchi row. It cannot support a score for this ingredient because it never tested it, and neither did the eight other numeric documents in the corpus.
- Mascarenhas-Melo F, Ribeiro MM, Hatami Kahkesh K, et al. "Comprehensive review of the skin use of bakuchiol: physicochemical properties, sources, bioactivities, nanotechnology delivery systems, regulatory and toxicological concerns." Phytochem Rev 23(5):1377–1413 (2024) An open-access, peer-reviewed narrative review, 37 pages, and the most complete technical dossier on this molecule that exists. It is the source of the physicochemistry on this page (C18H24O, 256.38 g/mol, octanol-water partition coefficient 5.09, water solubility 0.1–100 mg/L, all reported from the ECHA registration), of the ECHA human patch-test data (111 subjects, no irritation, results judged insufficient to classify), and of both contact-dermatitis case reports. It is cited above all for a negative that we verified by searching the complete text: it carries a dedicated section on regulatory and toxicological concerns, that section discusses irritation, sensitisation, allergy, hepatic metabolism, storage degradation and aquatic toxicity, and the words "comedogenic," "comedogenicity" and "comedone" appear nowhere in the document. This is a review, not new data, and it synthesises the same primary papers cited here. It is also internally inconsistent about the molecule's own history, giving 1966 in one section and 1973 in another, with the 1973 claim cited to a 1967 paper.
- Puyana C, Chandan N, Tsoukas M. "Applications of bakuchiol in dermatology: Systematic review of the literature." J Cosmet Dermatol 21(12):6636–6643 (2022) A systematic review of PubMed for bakuchiol in skin and dermatology, from the Department of Dermatology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It retrieved thirty articles: sixteen pre-clinical, seven clinical, three commentaries, two narrative reviews and one adverse-event report. Cited for the shape of the literature rather than for a finding — the clinical work is concentrated on photoaging, acne severity and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, none of the thirty is a comedogenicity assay, and the single adverse-event report in it is contact dermatitis. A systematic review is only as complete as its search terms and it searched one database, so it bounds the absence rather than proving it.
- Dhaliwal S, Rybak I, Ellis SR, et al. "Prospective, randomized, double-blind assessment of topical bakuchiol and retinol for facial photoageing." Br J Dermatol 180(2):289–296 (2019) The study cited whenever anyone says bakuchiol is "clinically proven," and a genuinely well-designed one: prospective, randomised, double-blind, 44 patients, twelve weeks, 0.5% bakuchiol twice daily against 0.5% retinol once daily. Its endpoints were wrinkle surface area and hyperpigmentation, measured from facial photographs, plus tolerability. Characterised narrowly and deliberately: it counted no comedones, it did not examine follicles, and it was not a study of acne or of pore-plugging. It establishes that bakuchiol does something to photoaged skin. It is not evidence of noncomedogenicity, and citing it as such would be the endpoint substitution this site exists to catch.
- Brownell L, Geen S, E Y, Lee WL. "A Clinical Study Evaluating the Efficacy of Topical Bakuchiol (UP256) Cream on Facial Acne." J Drugs Dermatol 20(3):307–310 (2021) The closest thing to relevant human data, and it comes with heavy qualifications. A single-centre, open-label pilot — no control arm, no randomisation, no blinding — in 13 subjects aged 12 to 30 with mild or moderate acne, enriched for Fitzpatrick III–VI, applying a cream containing 0.5% bakuchiol twice daily for twelve weeks. It is a study of a FINISHED FORMULA, not of the ingredient. It recorded non-inflammatory lesion counts, meaning comedones, which almost nothing else in this literature does. Its abstract reports a significant reduction in inflammatory lesions and improvement in post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation and reports NO result for the comedone count; the results section is paywalled and we have not read it, so we do not know what that number did and we decline to guess. Authors are affiliated with the Department of Dermatology at SUNY-Downstate and with Unigen Inc., the manufacturer of UP256. And structurally: a trial asking whether existing acne improves is not a test of whether an ingredient induces comedones.
- Poláková K, Fauger A, Sayag M, Jourdan E. "A dermocosmetic containing bakuchiol, Ginkgo biloba extract and mannitol improves the efficacy of adapalene in patients with acne vulgaris: result from a controlled randomized trial." Clin Cosmet Investig Dermatol 8:187–191 (2015) A controlled, randomised acne trial: 111 patients, adapalene 0.1% plus a dermocosmetic containing bakuchiol, Ginkgo biloba extract and mannitol versus adapalene plus vehicle, measuring inflammatory and non-inflammatory (comedonal) lesion counts. Cited as the second finished-formula acne trial in this literature, and characterised for what it cannot do: the test article is a multi-ingredient cream used as an adjunct to a drug, so any benefit cannot be attributed to bakuchiol, and a treatment trial in existing acne is not a comedogenicity induction assay. Often mis-cited to "Dréno"; the first author is Poláková.
- Chaudhuri RK, Bojanowski K. "Bakuchiol: a retinol-like functional compound revealed by gene expression profiling and clinically proven to have anti-aging effects." Int J Cosmet Sci 36(3):221–230 (2014) The paper that created the category. Gene-expression profiling showing bakuchiol up-regulates collagen types I, III and IV and other retinol-responsive genes, plus a small twelve-week clinical arm. Cited for the retinol-analogy claim and for the disclosure that usually travels without it: Chaudhuri is at Sytheon Ltd, which manufactures and sells bakuchiol as Sytenol A. This is industry-originated research on the company's own ingredient. That does not make it wrong, and the paper is peer-reviewed. It does mean it is not disinterested, and it says nothing about comedogenicity.
- Chaudhuri RK, Marchio F. "Bakuchiol in the management of acne-affected skin." Cosmetics & Toiletries 126(7):502 (2011) Not a peer-reviewed paper: an article in a cosmetics trade magazine, written by the supplier. Cited because it is the traceable origin of the acne figures that circulate as though they were clinical findings — a 57% reduction in acne over six weeks, 67% in combination with 2% salicylic acid. Those numbers appear across ingredient databases and brand pages with no indication of where they came from. This is where they came from. We are not asserting they are false; we are recording that they have never been through peer review and that their author sells the ingredient.
- Raison-Peyron N, Dereure O. "Allergic contact dermatitis to bakuchiol in a cosmetic cream." Contact Dermatitis (2020) A single case report: a 23-year-old woman with facial eczema traced to an anti-ageing eye cream, in whom a repeated open application test was positive from the first day and displayed what the authors call a follicular inflammatory pattern, with bakuchiol at 1% the only positive on subsequent testing. Cited because it is the one description in this literature of bakuchiol producing a follicular reaction, and cited with an explicit statement of what it is not: an allergic contact dermatitis in one person, with no comedone count and no comparison group. It is not comedogenicity data. We report it because a page defending an ingredient has an obligation to name the report that complicates it. Retrieved via the 2024 Phytochemistry Reviews review, which quotes the case in detail; we have not read the original.
- Malinauskiene L, Blaziene A, Chomiciene A, Isaksson M. "Bakuchiol — a new allergen in cosmetics." Contact Dermatitis (2019) The first published report of allergic contact dermatitis to bakuchiol: a 33-year-old woman with itchy erythematous plaques on the neck, perioral area and eyelids, patch-test positive to bakuchiol at 0.1%. Cited alongside the 2020 case as the complete set of adverse-event reports we could find for this ingredient, and characterised the same way: allergy is not comedogenicity, two case reports are not an incidence rate, and neither counted a comedone. Retrieved via the 2024 Phytochemistry Reviews review; we have not read the original.
- INCIDecoder — Bakuchiol A consumer ingredient database, and one that does publish comedogenicity information when it holds any. Cited for two things we verified on the page. First, it carries a long, detailed bakuchiol entry and prints no comedogenic rating at all — which is the honest position and is not the one every checker takes. Second, its own source list attributes the circulating acne percentages to the Chaudhuri and Marchio trade-magazine article above, which is how we traced them. It is not a measurement and not a primary source.
Others in the same family
Actives behave similarly enough that the evidence for one is often wrongly read across to the others. These are its structural relatives, not a guess. What the evidence says about actives as a family ›
Last reviewed 2026-07-13 · How we decide