Coconut Oil
Coconut oil is one of the most confidently rated ingredients in skincare and one of the least studied: its 4-out-of-5 comedogenic score comes from three rabbits in 1989, and no trial has ever tested it on a human face.
Heavy oil rich in lauric/myristic acids; widely advised against for acne-prone skin.
What it is
A fat pressed from coconut kernel, solid below about 25 °C and liquid above it. Roughly half of it is lauric acid, with meaningful amounts of myristic acid — both medium-chain saturated fatty acids. Formulators use it as an occlusive emollient: it sits on the skin, slows water loss, and leaves a rich slip. It is cheap, stable, and has an unusually strong consumer reputation, which is why it turns up far more often in "natural" and DIY skincare than its evidence base warrants.
Why we rate it Clogging
We rate it Clogging at Moderate confidence, and the honest version of why is worth stating plainly. The number everyone quotes — a comedogenic rating of 4 out of 5 — traces to a single 1989 paper by James Fulton in the Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists. Fulton diluted each ingredient to about 10% in propylene glycol and applied it to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, then scored the follicles for keratosis. That is the study. Every comedogenic list you have ever read, including ours, is downstream of it. What raises our confidence above that thin base is not better data but agreement: Fulton's own finding that medium-chain fatty acids are the most potent producers of follicular keratosis is mechanistically consistent with coconut oil's composition, and dermatologists broadly advise acne-prone patients away from it. That is informed consensus. It is not proof, and we are not going to dress it up as proof.
What the evidence doesn’t tell you
No randomised trial has tested topical coconut oil on facial acne in humans. The human trials that do exist studied dryness and atopic dermatitis on the body — Agero and Verallo-Rowell in 2004, Evangelista and colleagues in 2014 — and neither counted comedones. So the strongest claim anyone can honestly make about coconut oil and your face is an extrapolation from a rabbit's ear. A 2006 re-evaluation in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that rabbit-ear results do not reliably transfer to human skin, and a 2025 review in JAAD Reviews reached the same conclusion: the assay guided the ratings, then later work found the ratings inconsistent in people. Two further gaps matter here. The test used the raw ingredient at 10% in a penetration enhancer, not a finished formula — coconut oil third from the end of an ingredient list is not the thing that was tested. And the picture is genuinely contradictory: lauric acid, the fatty acid that makes up half of coconut oil, has been shown in the laboratory to kill Cutibacterium acnes, the bacterium implicated in inflammatory acne. An ingredient that may clog a pore and kill the bacteria in it is not a clean story, and nobody has run the study that would resolve it.
Where you’ll see it
Body oils and butters, hair masks, cleansing balms and oil cleansers, lip products, and a great deal of DIY and "natural" skincare. It appears on labels as Cocos Nucifera Oil. It is far less common in mainstream facial moisturisers, where formulators generally reach for fractionated coconut oil — caprylic/capric triglyceride — instead, which is a different ingredient with a different profile and a much lighter feel.
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. The rabbit-ear assay that produced the 0–5 comedogenic scale nearly every list online still uses, including this one. Method: ingredient diluted to roughly 10% in propylene glycol, applied to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, follicles scored for keratosis. Coconut oil scored 4.
- Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept." J Am Acad Dermatol (2006) Peer-reviewed rebuttal of the assay the rating rests on. Argues that rabbit-ear results do not reliably predict comedogenicity in human skin, and that testing isolated ingredients says little about a finished formula. This is the strongest published argument against taking our own headline number at face value, and it is why the confidence here is Moderate rather than High.
- "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals: A review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews (2025) Recent peer-reviewed review of the whole field, covering literature from 1972 to 2025. Finds that the rabbit-ear assay guided the ratings but produced inconsistent results in human skin, that no standardised comedogenicity test exists, and that the "non-comedogenic" label is unregulated. Independent of Fulton and of the ingredient lists that republish him.
- "The antimicrobial activity of liposomal lauric acids against Propionibacterium acnes." PMID 19665786 (2009) Laboratory work, not a clinical trial. Shows lauric acid — about half of coconut oil — killing the bacterium implicated in inflammatory acne. Cited here as the contradiction, not as a benefit: it is why the coconut oil story is unresolved rather than settled.
- acne.org comedogenic ingredient list Republishes the Fulton scores. Not an independent measurement. Listed because it is one of the places readers will have seen the number 4, and because naming it as a republisher is more useful than citing it as corroboration. The same is true of CosDNA, Face Reality and Banish: they are not four sources agreeing, they are one source quoted four times.
Others in the same family
Oils behave similarly enough that the evidence for one is often wrongly read across to the others. These are its structural relatives, not a guess.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24 · How we decide