Cetearyl Alcohol

Cetearyl alcohol is not the alcohol people are worried about; it is a waxy C16/C18 solid, and the only number any assay we hold has put on it is a 2 out of 5 on a rabbit's ear in 1989 — a score Fulton himself filed under "borderline" rather than positive.

What it is

A fatty alcohol, and the word "alcohol" is doing all the damage here. Ethanol is a two-carbon molecule that evaporates; cetearyl alcohol is a white waxy solid that melts at 50 to 55 degrees Celsius and is insoluble in water. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review describes it as a mixture of mostly cetyl alcohol (hexadecanol, sixteen carbons) and stearyl alcohol (octadecanol, eighteen carbons); technical grade runs roughly 65 to 80 percent stearyl and 20 to 35 percent cetyl, with small amounts of other chain lengths. On a European label it may also appear as cetostearyl alcohol. Formulators reach for it to hold an emulsion together and to thicken it. It is a co-emulsifier and a body-builder: it is a large part of why a cream feels like a cream rather than like a separated puddle of oil and water. It is rarely the active anything. In the CIR's 1982 use survey it was reported in 56 formulations, mostly at 1 to 5 percent, with a handful above 10 percent.

Why we rate it Caution

We rate it Caution, at Low confidence. The one assay we hold that measured this ingredient put it in the band its own author called borderline, and Caution is this site's word for a borderline reading. The number that circulates for cetearyl alcohol is a 2. It comes from one place: James Fulton's 1989 rabbit-ear survey, his table. Our transcription records section headings for two blocks of that paper only, and this is not one of them, so we give the row rather than a heading we cannot produce. Cetearyl alcohol scores 2 for comedogenicity and 1 for irritancy. Cetyl alcohol scores 2/2 and stearyl alcohol scores 2/2 alongside it. The method behind those numbers: the ingredient diluted to roughly 10 percent in propylene glycol, 1 ml spread on the inner ear of a New Zealand albino rabbit once a day, five days a week for two weeks, three rabbits per assay, the width of the follicular keratosis then measured under a micrometer. What almost nobody who quotes the 2 also quotes is Fulton's own key to his own scale: "a minimal grade of 0 to 1 is not considered significant. Grade 2 to 3 is borderline. However, a grade of 4 to 5 is uniformally reproduceable and considered positive." By the standard of the man who produced the number, a 2 is BORDERLINE. It is below his threshold for a positive, and it is not in the band he called insignificant either. We previously called it "the shrug in the middle of the scale," which quietly converted a borderline result into a negative one. It is not a finding of comedogenicity. It is also not a clean bill of health, and we should not have implied it was. Nothing else in the corpus we hold has measured it. Fulton's own earlier survey, the 1984 paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, has no cetearyl alcohol row; neither does Morris and Kwan 1983, nor Nguyen, Dang and Maibach 2007. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's 1988 assessment of cetearyl alcohol and its siblings runs to thirty-eight pages and concludes they are "safe as cosmetic ingredients in the present practices of use" — but it does not contain the words comedo, acne, sebaceous or follicle anywhere. It was not asked the question, and neither was the patch-test literature further down this page: those are documents about safety and about allergy, and they are not evidence about pores in either direction. There is no human comedogenicity study of cetearyl alcohol that we could find, and we looked past the point where the results stop being research and start being each other. One thing about the material itself. Cetearyl alcohol is a blend of cetyl and stearyl alcohols, and the name does not fix the ratio; Fulton records no ratio, no supplier and no grade for the sample he tested. The 65-to-80 percent stearyl figure above is the CIR's description of technical grade, not a description of his jar. His table does score both constituents separately, and both are flat 2s — cetyl alcohol 2, stearyl alcohol 2 — which is consistent with the blend's own 2 without being a second measurement of the blend. So Caution rests on one number, where this page used to rest on three arguments. The single assay that tested cetearyl alcohol put it in its own author's borderline band, which is neither a finding of comedogenicity nor a clean result, and nothing else we hold measured it in either direction, so there is nothing in the record that resolves the 2 upward or downward. That is the whole of it. The third leg was false and we are removing it in public, because it is more useful to you than the claim it replaces. This page argued that cetearyl alcohol sits "far outside" the 200–300 molecular-weight window Fulton proposed as the zone of maximum follicular penetration. It does not. Cetyl alcohol is 242 g/mol and stearyl alcohol is 270 g/mol. Both sit squarely INSIDE that window. We had invented a mechanism, in the confident register of a chemistry textbook, and it pointed the opposite way from the rating it was written to support. Nobody had to read a paper to catch it — only to do the arithmetic — and for a while nobody did, including us. If Fulton's penetration zone means anything at all, it is a small argument AGAINST this ingredient, not for it. The rating does not rest on that mechanism and never did, but you are entitled to know that the reasoning you were reading last week was wrong, and that this is what was left when we took it out.

What the evidence doesn’t tell you

The rating rests on a rabbit's ear. That is the whole of the direct evidence, and it is the same 1989 assay we discount for every other ingredient on this site. Draelos and DiNardo's 2006 paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that rabbit-ear results do not reliably transfer to human skin; the 2025 JAAD Reviews survey of the field found that no standardised comedogenicity test exists at all and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated claim. Those findings are the reason we do not trust the 4s. They are equally the reason we cannot lean on this 2. The gap this page cannot close: nobody we can find has tested cetearyl alcohol on a human face for comedones. The CIR's only human study of cetearyl alcohol itself is a sensitisation panel — 25 subjects, 3 percent in a cream, no sensitisation. That is a study of allergy, not of pores. The closest thing to a follicular event in the human data is from a study of cetyl alcohol, not cetearyl: 80 men, 11.5 percent cetyl alcohol in a cream base applied five times a day for ten days, and one subject developed erythema, folliculitis and pustules on the forearm. Folliculitis and pustules are not comedones, one subject out of eighty is not a rate, and that was a different molecule at a concentration few products use. We mention it because it is the only thing there is, not because it supports a conclusion. The pairing is a real caveat, and it is the reason this ingredient is flagged as conflicted in our data. Fulton's table contains three separate rows here, and keeping them separate is the entire point. Cetearyl alcohol on its own: 2. Ceteareth-20 on its own: 2. The two of them together: 4 — inside the band Fulton called "considered positive." He never explains it. The nearest thing to an explanation in the paper is a general remark: "Some ingredient combinations ... appear more comedogenic than the individual compounds themselves. These synergistic reactions need to be studied further." Thirty-seven years later they have not been. The honest position is that the blend has a worse rabbit-ear score than either of its parts, and no explanation we can find accounts for it. We previously called that blend "the self-emulsifying blend sold as emulsifying wax," and then told you a label reading "cetearyl alcohol" would not reveal whether the ceteareth was in there too. Both halves of that were wrong. Fulton's table has a THIRD row, Emulsifying Wax NF, and he scored it 0 — so "emulsifying wax" and "cetearyl alcohol + ceteareth-20" are demonstrably not the same material even inside his own paper, and we had merged a 0 into a 4. And ingredient lists declare each ingredient: if a formula contains ceteareth-20, the label says ceteareth-20. We told readers their labels were hiding something, on a page whose reason for existing is that labels are the only honest thing they have. If you see both names, Fulton's 4 is worth knowing about. If you see only cetearyl alcohol, the 4 is not your ingredient. On the "alcohol" panic specifically: we can say with confidence that cetearyl alcohol is chemically nothing like ethanol, because its chain length, melting point and water-insolubility are matters of record. We have not found a study directly comparing cetearyl alcohol to ethanol on human skin barrier function, so the common claim that fatty alcohols are moisturising where ethanol is drying is, as far as we can tell, an argument from structure that nobody, as far as we can find, has run as an experiment. It is a good argument. It is not a measurement. Finally, the one thing about cetearyl alcohol that has been measured repeatedly in humans is something else entirely: contact allergy. In a 2022 Slovenian study of 748 consecutively patch-tested patients, cetearyl alcohol at 20 percent in petrolatum produced one positive reaction — 0.1 percent, below the 0.5 percent threshold used to justify a place in the European baseline series, though earlier reports put it at 0.4 to 0.9 percent. It is a recognised allergen, and the British Society for Cutaneous Allergy publishes a patient leaflet for people who react to it. That is a genuinely different question from whether it clogs pores, and it is worth keeping the two apart. Where an ingredient lands on comedogenicity here says nothing about whether it is the reason a small number of people cannot use most of the emollient creams in a pharmacy.

Where you’ll see it

Almost anywhere there is a cream rather than a gel or a serum: moisturisers, cleansing milks, conditioners, sunscreens, foundations, shaving creams, and a very large share of prescription and pharmacy emollients and steroid creams. It sits in the middle of an ingredient list, typically at 1 to 5 percent. Nearby on the same label you will often meet cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol, ceteareth-20 and cetearyl olivate; they are related but not interchangeable, and the evidence on this page does not transfer to them. Ceteareth-20 in particular matters — see the note above about the blend.

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.

1. Fulton JE. "Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products." J Soc Cosmet Chem 40:321-333 (1989) The primary source, and the only assay in the corpus we searched that tested cetearyl alcohol for comedogenicity. Method: ingredient diluted to roughly 10% in propylene glycol, 1 ml applied to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, five days a week for two weeks, follicular keratosis measured with a micrometer. Cetearyl alcohol appears among the alcohol rows of his table, scored 2 for comedogenicity and 1 for irritancy. The same table scores the cetearyl alcohol / ceteareth-20 blend at 4. Fulton's own key, quoted verbatim on this page, places 2 in the "borderline" band and reserves "positive" for 4 and 5. He also calls his own survey "not at all definitive but simply designed to stimulate research", and notes that the rabbit ear is so sensitive that "not everything that irritates this model will also irritate human skin". Every comedogenic rating for this ingredient anywhere online ultimately traces here.
2. Cosmetic Ingredient Review. "Final Report on the Safety Assessment of Cetearyl Alcohol, Cetyl Alcohol, Isostearyl Alcohol, Myristyl Alcohol, and Behenyl Alcohol." J Am Coll Toxicol 7(3):359-396 (1988) Industry-funded but independently paneled toxicological safety review; reaffirmed by the panel in 2005. Concluded these fatty alcohols are "safe as cosmetic ingredients in the present practices of use." The source of the chemistry on this page — cetearyl alcohol as a white waxy solid, a 65-80% stearyl / 20-35% cetyl mixture, melting at 50-55°C, insoluble in water — and of the 1982 use data (56 reported formulations, mostly 1-5%). Also the source of the two human data points cited: a 25-subject sensitisation panel on 3% cetearyl alcohol in cream (no sensitisation) and the 80-subject cetyl alcohol tolerance study in which one man developed folliculitis and pustules. The critical limitation, and the reason it cannot be read as support for the rating: the report never assesses comedogenicity. The words comedo, acne, sebaceous and follicle do not appear in it. It answers a different question.
3. Bizjak M, Adamič K, Bajrovič N, et al. "Patch testing with the European baseline series and 10 added allergens: Single-centre study of 748 patients." Contact Dermatitis 87(5):439-446 (2022) Genuinely independent human data, and the only modern controlled human study on this page — but it measures allergy, not comedones. 748 consecutive adults with suspected allergic contact dermatitis, patch tested at a Slovenian referral centre between January 2019 and October 2021. Cetearyl alcohol was tested at 20% in petrolatum and produced 1 positive reaction: 0.1%, 95% CI 0.0-0.7. The authors note earlier reports of 0.4-0.9% and describe it as "a borderline component of baseline series". They explicitly did not assess the clinical relevance of positive reactions. Cited to characterise the allergy question and to keep it separate from the pore question.
4. British Society for Cutaneous Allergy. "Cetearyl alcohol" — allergen patient information leaflet (updated March 2025) A dermatology society's guidance to patients who have already patch-tested positive to cetearyl alcohol. Not evidence of comedogenicity and not offered as such; cited to establish that cetearyl alcohol contact allergy is a recognised clinical entity with its own avoidance list, and to show how widely the ingredient is distributed through pharmacy emollients and steroid creams. It says nothing about acne or pores.
5. Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept." J Am Acad Dermatol (2006) Peer-reviewed rebuttal of the rabbit-ear assay. Argues its results do not reliably predict comedogenicity in human skin, and that testing an isolated ingredient says little about a finished formula. Cited against our own rating as much as for it: it is part of why the confidence on this page is Low, and why a single borderline number is not treated here as a measurement of anything on a face.
6. "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals: A review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews (2025) Recent peer-reviewed review of the field, covering literature from 1972 to 2025. Finds that no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that the "non-comedogenic" label is unregulated. It is a synthesis of the legacy literature, not a new measurement, and independent of Fulton only in authorship, since the corpus it surveys includes his.
7. CosDNA ingredient database The source currently attached to this ingredient in our own ratings file, and a republisher of the Fulton-derived scores. Not an independent measurement. The same is true of acne.org, Face Reality, Banish and Sofie Pavitt: on cetearyl alcohol, as on every other ingredient, they are not several sources agreeing but one 1989 assay quoted several times.

Others in the same family

Fatty alcohols 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 fatty alcohols as a family ›

• Cetyl Alcohol Caution Low
• Isocetyl Alcohol Clogging Low
• Oleyl Alcohol Clogging Low
• Stearyl Alcohol Caution Low

Last reviewed 2026-08-20 · How we decide

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