Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride
Caprylic/capric triglyceride is rated Clear on one low number, and the number is genuinely in the table: Fulton's 1989 rabbit-ear survey prints a 1 out of 5, inside the band he himself called not significant. What the lists we checked do not mention is the name it is printed under. Fulton's row reads "Glyceryl tricapylo/caprate" — not this ingredient's modern name, and not even the standard older spelling of that name. We think the row is this material anyway, and the page says why.
Fulton's 1 of 5 is printed as glyceryl tricapylo/caprate, not under the INCI name.
What it is
A manufactured emollient oil, built rather than pressed. It is a triglyceride — fatty acids esterified to a glycerin backbone, the same architecture as any vegetable oil — but the fatty acids are restricted to two short ones: caprylic acid, which is eight carbons long, and capric acid, which is ten. It is not a single compound. What is in the bottle is a mixture of glycerol triesters carrying C8 and C10 residues in varying combinations, which is why cosmetic nomenclature treats the single-acid triesters — tricaprylin, all C8; tricaprin, all C10 — as separate ingredients, assessed separately in the same safety review. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's final amended report on triglycerides gives its manufacture in a single sentence: coconut oil is hydrolysed, the free glycerin removed, the medium-chain fatty acids separated by fractional distillation, then blended "in the proper ratio" and re-esterified with glycerin. The same report describes triglycerides generally as produced "via classical Fischer type esterification" — carboxylic acids reacted with glycerin — and in some cases by transesterification. What it does not record is which feedstock stands behind any particular commercial batch, and we have not established that either. What comes out is a thin, light liquid used as a lightweight emollient and as a solvent for oil-soluble ingredients. On a label it is Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride. It is usually coconut-derived, and it is not coconut oil. Coconut oil is a mixed triglyceride whose fatty acids run longer, and it is lauric-rich. Fulton scored free lauric acid 4 of 5, and his conclusion names "lauric acid derivatives such as laureth-4" among the major offenders. Those longer chains are not in the C8/C10 fraction this material is built from. We flag that as chemistry rather than as a measurement: nothing we hold establishes that lauric or myristic residues are the measured cause of coconut oil's reputation, and leaving them out is not itself a result. "Fractionated coconut oil" is the other name a reader meets, and it is not a precise one. Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride is the cosmetic INCI identity; "fractionated coconut oil" is a market term with no single agreed definition, applied to C8/C10 medium-chain triglyceride products that may or may not have been made the same way. The two are overlapping commercial descriptions, not a clean chemical distinction — which is worth knowing on a site about materials being confused with one another.
Why we rate it Clear
We rate it Clear at Low confidence. There is one number under that rating, it is a low one, and it is really in the primary table — but it is a single rabbit-ear reading, and the row it comes from is not printed under this ingredient's name. Read the row first. Fulton's 1989 survey in the Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists is where nearly every comedogenic score still in circulation comes from, and most of the errors this site documents are one of its numbers pinned to the wrong molecule. We read Table I off a 400dpi render of the journal scan, row by row. There is no row anywhere in it for "Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride". What there is, among the glycerin and glyceryl-ester rows, is "Glyceryl tricapylo/caprate — 1". That is Fulton's spelling, reproduced exactly. It is not the modern INCI name, and it is not even the standard older chemical name, glyceryl tricaprylate/caprate — it reads as a misprint of it. So the question this page has to answer is whether that row is caprylic/capric triglyceride or only resembles it, and our answer is that it is. It is worth setting out the reasoning rather than leaving it at a resemblance, because on this site a score attached to a material the paper did not test is the commonest way a page goes wrong. Whatever the typesetting accident, the name resolves one way: glyceryl, tri-, caprylic and capric. A glycerol triester of C8 and C10 acids is what caprylic/capric triglyceride is. The "tri" carries weight — it separates the row from glyceryl caprylate/caprate, a real and different cosmetic ingredient that is a monoester — and Fulton's table shows he was tracking backbones deliberately, since he gave the propylene-glycol and pentaerythritol versions rows of their own. We can find no other cosmetic material that name could be describing. What the argument does not reach is the grade. Fulton gives no supplier, no trade name, no CAS number, no C8:C10 ratio and no statement of purity for the material behind that row — and none for any other row in the paper either. So both halves stand: the row is this ingredient, and it is not a documented match to any particular modern commercial grade. We carry the 1 with the second half attached, and a reader who wants to check it should look for Fulton's spelling, not ours. What a 1 is worth is set by Fulton's own key, which the lists reliably drop. He graded 0 to 5 and wrote that "a minimal grade of 0 to 1 is not considered significant," that 2 to 3 is borderline, and that 4 to 5 is "uniformally reproduceable and considered positive." A 1 sits inside the band he called not significant. The row carries no asterisk and no range, and it is not among the rows under his heading "VI. Oils*", whose asterisk he defines once as "Results depend on source of raw material" and which governs every oil and butter beneath it. So the caveat that qualifies the coconut butter and cocoa butter fours does not attach to this number. Several neighbouring rows are worth naming so that they are not read into this one. Fulton scored the free acids separately — "Caprylic acid — 1" and "Capric acid — 2" — and a loose fatty acid is not the same test material as the same acid esterified to glycerol, the distinction that separates lauric acid from the lauroyl groups in coconut oil elsewhere on this site. He also scored two propylene-glycol esters, "PG caprylate/caprate — 2" and "PG dicaprylate/caprate — 1", which are not triglycerides at all, and a four-armed pentaerythritol ester, "Pentaerythrital tetra capra/caprylate — 0". The C8/C10 rows do sit at the low end of his table. But each is its own row and its own test material, and the 1 we are reporting is the triglyceride row's, not an average of the family.
What the evidence doesn’t tell you
Everything above rests on one measurement, and it is a rabbit's ear. Fulton's method was to dilute an ingredient to roughly 10% in propylene glycol, apply it to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, five days a week for two weeks, and score the follicles for keratosis under a micrometer. He called the survey "not at all definitive but simply designed to stimulate research," and was candid that the model's disadvantage is its sensitivity — not everything that reacts on the rabbit ear reacts on human skin. A 1 from that assay is a low reading on a contested instrument, not a clearance for a face. The grade gap is part of the rating rather than a footnote to it. A 1 for "Glyceryl tricapylo/caprate" is a 1 for whatever material Fulton had in 1989 under that misspelled name. We cannot recover its supplier, its C8:C10 ratio, its purity, or whether it was a triglyceride-only grade rather than a broader glyceride mixture, because the paper records none of that for any of its rows. Deciding that the row is this ingredient is not the same as knowing what was in the bottle, and the reading is strong enough to carry a Clear — but it is not the same thing as a modern grade having been through the assay. There is no second assay to set beside it. We identified no independent comedogenicity study of caprylic/capric triglyceride: Morris and Kwan's 1983 rabbit-ear survey, on the same 0–5 scale and a legacy assay that openly contradicts Fulton in print, has no row for it under any spelling; and Fulton's own earlier paper with Pay and Fulton, 1984, whose 44-row table we also hold, contains no caprylic, capric or medium-chain triglyceride row at all. So the corroboration a Clear rating would ideally have is not in anything we hold. There is one number, from one laboratory, in one year. We identified no human comedogenicity study of isolated caprylic/capric triglyceride — no comedone counts on human skin, no facial trial of the material on its own. The many pages online that call it "0–1" and "non-comedogenic" are not reporting human evidence; they are quoting Fulton's 1, sometimes rounding it toward 0, and adding a chemical argument that the short C8/C10 chains lack coconut oil's lauric and myristic acids. That argument is reasonable and it is the reason the ingredient exists, but a plausible mechanism is not a measurement and we are not going to present it as one. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's assessment, cited below, is a safety document rather than a comedogenicity one, and it should be read for exactly what it tested. Its panel concluded that the 51 triglycerides it reviewed, this one among them, "are safe in cosmetics in the present practices of use and concentration described in this safety assessment." The human tolerance data behind that are narrow, and the report is careful about which of them had a stated method: undiluted material was not irritating in a group of 12 in a 21-day patch test, nor in a group of 40 whose test methods it says were "not described"; it produced no irritation in 4-hour patch tests; and a facial oil containing 95.51% of the ingredient was not an irritant in a 24-hour single-insult occlusive patch test in 17 subjects and not a sensitiser in a modified maximisation test in 26. Those are small studies of irritation and sensitisation, not of follicular plugging, and the report contains no comedogenicity data for this ingredient. Nor is "never sensitising" a claim the record supports: two case reports of allergic contact dermatitis attributed to caprylic/capric triglyceride in cosmetic creams have been published since, in 2020 and 2022. Rare allergy says nothing about pores — it is named here only because a universal negative would have been wrong.
Where you’ll see it
On a label it reads Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, sometimes with "(and)" partners, and occasionally under the older name glyceryl tricaprylate/caprate. It turns up across leave-on and rinse-off skincare, colour cosmetics, sunscreens and cleansing oils, as a general-purpose lightweight emollient and a solvent for oil-soluble actives and pigments. Those are illustrative categories, not a measured prevalence — we have not audited the market, and a position on an ingredient list does not tell you a concentration. The one thing worth doing at the label is not confusing it with its neighbours. "Coconut oil" (Cocos Nucifera Oil) is a different ingredient with its own entry, and "coconut butter" is a common name covering more than one identity — the material Fulton scored 4 under that name, in the oils section whose asterisk he defines as "Results depend on source of raw material", is not identified in his paper, and is the subject of its own page here. Caprylic/capric triglyceride is a separately manufactured C8/C10 triglyceride and does not share their ratings in either direction. The word "coconut" does not appear in its INCI name, and that is accurate.
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 primary source of nearly every comedogenic score in circulation, and the origin of this one. Read off a 400dpi render of the journal scan rather than off a list quoting it. Method: ingredient at roughly 10% in propylene glycol, inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, five days a week for two weeks, follicular keratosis measured under a micrometer; scale 0–5, where by his own key 0–1 "is not considered significant." Table I has no row named Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride. The row we are reading is printed "Glyceryl tricapylo/caprate — 1" — Fulton's spelling, a misprint of the older chemical name glyceryl tricaprylate/caprate — with no asterisk, no range, and not under the asterisked "VI. Oils*" heading. Separately printed, and separate test materials: "Caprylic acid" 1, "Capric acid" 2, "PG caprylate/caprate" 2, "PG dicaprylate/caprate" 1, "Pentaerythrital tetra capra/caprylate" 0. The paper gives no supplier, CAS number, ratio or grade for any row, so it establishes a low number for a material identified only by that name. Cited as the one and only assay behind the rating.
- Fiume MM, Bergfeld WF, Belsito DV, Hill RA, Klaassen CD, Liebler DC, Marks JG, Shank RC, Slaga TJ, Snyder PW, Heldreth B. "Amended Safety Assessment of Triglycerides as Used in Cosmetics." Final Amended Report, Cosmetic Ingredient Review, 14 February 2018; published Int J Toxicol 41(3 Suppl):22S–68S (2022) An expert-panel safety review of 51 triglycerides, this one included, updating the CIR's 1980 report and its 2003 reaffirmation. The document state matters: the figures here are read from the 2018 Final Amended Report, not from the 2017 "Re-Review for Panel Review" draft that also circulates. Not a comedogenicity study, not downstream of Fulton, and not an independent check on him. Cited for three things we could read in it: that tricaprylin and tricaprin are assessed as separate ingredients from this mixture; the manufacturing description (coconut oil hydrolysed, glycerin removed, C8/C10 acids separated by fractional distillation, blended and re-esterified, alongside its general account of triglyceride manufacture by "classical Fischer type esterification" and transesterification); and its conclusion that the reviewed triglycerides "are safe in cosmetics in the present practices of use and concentration described in this safety assessment", supported by irritation and sensitisation testing (undiluted material not irritating in a group of 12 in a 21-day patch test and in a group of 40 whose methods it records as "not described", and none in 4-hour patch tests; a 95.51% facial oil, not an irritant in 17 subjects and not a sensitiser in 26). It reports no comedogenicity data for this ingredient, and safety as used is not evidence about follicular plugging.
- Navarro-Triviño FJ, Ruiz-Villaverde R. "Allergic contact dermatitis caused by caprylic/capric triglyceride from an anti-aging cosmetic cream." Contact Dermatitis 83:508–510 (2020); and Khan W, Stone N. "Facial allergic contact dermatitis caused by caprylic/capric triglyceride in a cosmetic cream." Contact Dermatitis 86:310–311 (2022) Two single-patient case reports of patch-test-confirmed allergic contact dermatitis, published after the CIR assessment closed. A case report is the weakest study design there is: no denominator, no prevalence, no control. They are cited for one narrow purpose — they are why this page does not say the ingredient is non-sensitising. Contact allergy is not comedogenicity, and neither report counted a comedone.
- acne.org comedogenic ingredient list A downstream republisher, cited to show where a reader meets the "0–1" figure. It and the other circulating lists (CosDNA, and the various skincare blogs) are not independent measurements; they report Fulton's 1, sometimes rounded toward 0, and layer on the chemical argument that the C8/C10 chains lack coconut oil's lauric and myristic acids. None of the lists we checked prints the name the row is actually under. Listed as a republisher of the one assay, not as corroboration of it.
Others in the same family
Esters 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 esters as a family ›
Last reviewed 2026-08-01 · How we decide