Lanolin & derivatives
A comedogenic chart prints one number against lanolin. The three rabbit-ear tables this project has read print TWENTY-ONE rows carrying the name, covering fourteen distinct materials, and on the same 0-to-5 scale they run from 0 to 4-5. Wherever a paper tested the whole wax it sat at the bottom of that paper's own range. The derivatives occupy the entire scale, in both directions, so "derivative" is not a direction either. The number tracks which material was in the jar, and the samples that reach the top are the ones the papers characterise least completely.
What they are
Lanolin is the greasy secretion of a sheep's skin, scoured off the wool. It is a mixture rather than a molecule, dominated by esters of sterols, triterpene alcohols and aliphatic alcohols, with free alcohols, sterols, fatty acids and hydrocarbons making up the rest, and the proportions move with the flock, the fleece and the refining. What holds this family together is not a shared structure. It is a shared STARTING MATERIAL. Every member is that wax, put through something, and there are two different somethings. Some members are PHYSICAL fractions - the wax separated into parts that were already in it, which is where lanolin oil, lanolin wax, the lanolin alcohols and the lanolin acids come from. Others are CHEMICAL derivatives - the wax, or one of its fractions, reacted with something else, which is where the acetylated, ethoxylated and isopropyl-esterified members come from. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's 2024 final amended report is the document that keeps these apart on paper, giving them separate ingredient names, separate CAS numbers and separate manufacturing routes. That distinction is the whole of this page, and it is the distinction the charts collapse. WE FILE FIVE INGREDIENTS HERE, and the table below is the list. The prose that follows quotes rows for a good many materials that are NOT in it, because the family-level fact is only visible if you read across all of them - lanolin alcohol, lanolin oil, lanolin wax, the lanolin acids, laneth-10, ethoxylated lanolin, PEG 75 lanolin, PPG 12 PEG 65 lanolin oil and hydroxylated lanolin are none of them ingredients we rate, and none of them will appear in this family's member list. We say so here because a page whose subject is materials being confused with one another is the worst possible place to name a member its own table does not contain, and this site has done exactly that once already, on the oil hub. FULTON'S GROUPINGS AND OUR FAMILY ARE ALSO DIFFERENT SETS. His 1984 table gathers four rows under a section headed simply "Lanolins", which is a heading we hold. For 1989 we hold no heading over these rows at all: that table was transcribed row by row, without its section titles, so we can tell you which rows carry the name and that they run together in the printed table, and nothing about how he filed them. Neither paper has a row for isopropyl lanolate, which we do file here, and both have rows for materials we file nowhere. Where the sets diverge is usually the interesting part, and we mean OUR family unless we say otherwise.
What the evidence actually says
Three tables. Twenty-one rows. All of them carry the word lanolin, and all of them are on a 0-to-5 scale - though not, and this matters before the list rather than after it, under one key. Fulton's 1989 key reads "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." His 1984 key draws the line in a different place: "a minimal grade of 1 to 2 is not considered significant. However, a grading score of 3 or above is uniformly reproducible and considered positive." So a 3 is borderline in one paper and positive in the other, from the same first author, and the two numbers must never be laid side by side without carrying each paper's own key. We hold no key at all for the third table, Morris and Kwan's, so we report their digits and decline to translate them. FULTON 1989, ten rows, roughly 10 per cent of the ingredient in propylene glycol. Anhydrous lanolin 0-1*. Lanolin oil 0-1*. Lanolin wax 1. Lanolin alcohol 0-2*. Acetylated lanolin 0. Laneth-10 2. PPG 12 PEG 65 lanolin oil 2, printed with the spacing the paper uses. PEG 75 lanolin 0. And two rows in his positive band, both printed as 4: one against PEG 16 lanolin, which he prints with the trade name Solulan 16 in brackets, and one against acetylated lanolin ALCOHOL. FULTON 1984, four rows, two rabbits per test. That paper's footnote says a product or ingredient was used as is if it was a liquid or soft solid, and that the starred rows were either diluted with mineral oil or incorporated into an alcohol gel at 10 per cent. None of these four rows is starred. Anhydrous lanolin 2. Lanolin alcohol 2. Ethoxylated lanolin 3. And a 4 against the plain acetylated ester, printed under the undivided name acetylated lanolin, with no separate alcohol row anywhere in that paper. Under that paper's own key the first two are not significant and the last two are positive. MORRIS AND KWAN 1983, a different laboratory, seven rows, undiluted unless a dilution is stated. Lanolin, which they name as the grade Super Corona, 0. Lanolin oil, two grades they name as Lanogene and Lantrol, 0-1 and 1. Lanolin alcohol at 30 per cent in mineral oil, 1-2. Isopropyl lanolate, neat, 3. Lanolin acid at 50 per cent in mineral oil, 4. And 4-5 for acetylated lanolin alcohol. FOURTEEN MATERIALS, AND HERE IS THE RULE WE COUNTED BY. One material per ingredient name as the papers print it, setting trade grade and stated dilution aside. That merges Morris and Kwan's two lanolin oils, Lanogene and Lantrol, because both are printed as lanolin oil. It keeps their Lanolin (Super Corona) apart from Fulton's Anhydrous lanolin, because those are two different printed names and neither paper says they are the same material. And it counts Fulton 1984's ethoxylated lanolin separately from his 1989 laneth-10, for the same reason. Under a stricter rule that treated lanolin and anhydrous lanolin as one material the total would be thirteen. Twenty-one rows either way, and the rule is stated so a reader can disagree with it and still check the arithmetic. NOW THE SHAPE, and it has two halves that have to be said together. Wherever a paper put the whole wax on an ear, it landed at the bottom of that paper's own range: 0-1* and 2 in Fulton's two tables, 0 in Morris and Kwan's. And the derivatives do NOT simply run higher. In the 1989 table alone they run from 0 to 4 - acetylated lanolin and PEG 75 lanolin are both derivatives and both scored zero, sitting under laneth-10's 2 and a long way under the two 4s. So the tidy sentence available here, that modifying lanolin makes it comedogenic, is not one his own table will carry in that form. What is true is narrower and stranger: the whole material clusters, and the derivatives scatter across the entire scale. Which modification, not how much modification. AND FULTON HIMSELF WROTE THE TIDY SENTENCE, which is the part of this page a reader is owed plainly. On page 323 of the 1989 paper he puts it in prose: "Among the lanolins, the classic anhydrous lanolins are not as comedogenic as the moderately ethoxylated derivatives (laneth 10)." His 1984 abstract says a version of the same thing, that lanolins "continue to be a problem, especially derivatives such as acetylated or ethoxylated lanolins." So the direction this page declines to generalise is one its own author asserted, in both papers, and we are not going to quote the two passages that suit us and leave out the third. What we can do is hold the sentence against the table it was printed beside. On the pair he actually names it holds, and it is small: anhydrous lanolin 0-1* against laneth-10's 2, about one grade, with neither row reaching the 4 his own key calls positive. Widen it by one row and it stops. The ethoxylated rows in that same table do not climb with the ethoxylation - laneth-10 reads 2, PEG 16 lanolin reads 4, and PEG 75 lanolin, the most heavily ethoxylated of the three, reads 0, the same score he gave acetylated lanolin. His own word for it is the careful one: MODERATELY ethoxylated. Read as a comparison between two named materials, his sentence stands and his table supports it. Read as a rule about derivatives, his table is where it fails, and this page takes the narrow reading because that is the one the rows will bear - not because the author can be shown to have agreed with us. THE PART NO SINGLE INGREDIENT PAGE CAN CARRY is what Fulton did with his own two positives. In the same 1989 paper, in prose, he explains both of them away, and in both cases he names something that is not lanolin. On the first: the acetylated lanolin alcohols "are both comedogenic and irritating, not because of the acetylated lanolin but because of the cetyl acetate additive" - and cetyl acetate has its own row in his table, also at 4. On the second: PEG 16 lanolin (Solulan 16) "is quite comedogenic and irritating, perhaps secondary to the combination of nonlanolin additives: ceteth-16, oleth-16, and steareth-16." Two rows reach his positive band. He attributes both to what came with the material rather than to the lanolin in it. A reader meeting either number on a chart is meeting a figure its own author qualified in the same paper, and you have to hold both rows at once to see that it happened twice. WHAT HE OFFERS IS A SUSPICION, NOT AN EXPERIMENT. "Perhaps secondary to" is a sentence; neither paper takes a blend apart and tests the ethoxylated lanolin or the isolated alcohol separately, so reading Fulton's explanation as an exoneration would be the same error running backwards. What is independently documented is that at least one of the two really is a mixture: Lubrizol still sells Solulan 16 and its datasheet gives the INCI as Ceteth-16, Laneth-16, Oleth-16 and Steareth-16, four components, one of which is the ethoxylated lanolin. That confirms what the trade name denotes today. It does not certify the 1989 sample. THE OTHER LABORATORY BLAMES NOTHING, AND WE HAVE NOT READ THE PAGE WHERE IT WOULD. Six of Morris and Kwan's thirty-two rows contain a 4, counting every row whose printed grade includes one, which takes in the two ranges printed 3-4: isopropyl myristate at 50 per cent in propylene glycol, and propylene glycol isostearate. Four rows have a lower bound of 4 - isopropyl linoleate 4-5, isopropyl isostearate 4, lanolin acid at 50 per cent in mineral oil 4, and the acetylated lanolin alcohol, which Morris and Kwan graded 4-5 - and two of those four carry the name lanolin. We hold no grading key for this paper, so none of those digits gets a band from us. Their table gives no trade name and no blend for either lanolin row. Of their discussion we hold exactly one sentence, and it is about something else - their finding that sodium lauryl sulfate is not comedogenic, which they say in print conflicts with the high scores published by Fulton. So we cannot tell you what they thought was responsible for their two - only that Fulton's explanation is Fulton's, and it does not travel to their readings. Their two are not his experiment either: their acetylated lanolin alcohol was undiluted and their lanolin acids were a fraction at 50 per cent in mineral oil, against his roughly 10 per cent in propylene glycol. Count the whole corpus and there are FIVE readings at 4 or above in this family, taken under four different preparations - two of Fulton's 1989 rows at about 10 per cent in propylene glycol, one unstarred row in his 1984 table, one undiluted row of Morris and Kwan's, and one fraction at half strength in mineral oil - and no paper we hold repeats any of them at a second concentration. There is no dose-response curve here for anything. FULTON ALSO CONTRADICTS HIMSELF ON ONE MEMBER, and it is the member whose correction this site is proudest of. In 1989 the row for acetylated lanolin reads zero, and the positive reading in that table belongs to acetylated lanolin ALCOHOL, a separately named material with its own CAS number, which sits next to it in our transcription - though a transcription is not a map of the page, and we make no claim about where either row fell. In 1984 there is no separate alcohol row anywhere in the paper, and the undivided row under that ingredient's own name is a 4, positive under that paper's key. The 1984 abstract sentence quoted above, naming acetylated and ethoxylated lanolins as the problem, belongs to that same earlier paper. He issued no correction and no retraction between the two, and we are not going to pick. ONE MEMBER OF THIS FAMILY STOPPED BEING THE SUBJECT AND BECAME THE INSTRUMENT. By 1998, Mitra and colleagues, testing a herbal cream in the Indian Journal of Dermatology, used acetylated lanolin alcohol as the agent to INDUCE comedones in rabbit ear canals - four groups of rabbits, comedogenesis produced deliberately so that something else could be measured against it. We have read the abstract and not the paper. What it shows is not a comedogenicity score but a status: the material was reliable enough in that model to be the tool. Fulton's table has a comparable case in another family, where grade 5 is defined as comedones "similar to those induced by the application of our standard 'positive' testing agent, isopropyl myristate" - a number that is a ruler rather than a reading. A family that supplies the induction agent is not a family whose top scores can be waved off, and we are not waving them off. SO THE ASTERISK, LAST, AND WITH LESS TO SAY ABOUT IT THAN AN EARLIER DRAFT OF THIS PAGE THOUGHT. Fulton's 1989 footnote reads "results depend on source of raw material". On his oils it sits on the section heading, VI. Oils*, where it governs every row underneath, which is why a 4 from that part of his table is not an unqualified 4. Over the lanolin rows we hold no heading at all, because those rows were transcribed one at a time without their section titles - so we cannot tell you whether a heading-level mark sits over them too, and the absence of one in our notes is a fact about the transcription, not about the paper. What we can report is where the mark is printed on the rows themselves: on three of the ten 1989 lanolin rows - anhydrous lanolin, lanolin oil and lanolin alcohol - and on none of the other seven. Those three are unmodified or physically fractionated materials, which is a tempting pattern until you notice that lanolin wax, also a physical fraction, is printed without one. Fulton gives no reason, in the table or in the prose we hold, for which rows got the mark. And the 1984 asterisk is a different mark with a different meaning - there it says the row was diluted with mineral oil or carried in an alcohol gel - so the two must never be read as one convention. We report where each is printed. We cannot tell you what governed either.
What the evidence doesn’t tell you
EVERY NUMBER ABOVE CAME OUT OF A RABBIT'S EAR, and mostly out of one laboratory. The 1989 method, stated plainly: the ingredient mixed at roughly one part in ten with propylene glycol, about 1 ml applied to the inner surface of one ear of a New Zealand albino rabbit, three rabbits per assay, five days a week for two weeks, the other ear untreated, follicular keratosis then measured with a dial micrometer. Fulton called that survey "not at all definitive but simply designed to stimulate research", and his warning about the model travels with every number taken from it: not everything that irritates this model will also irritate human skin. Two of our three tables come from his bench - the 1989 one his alone, the 1984 one with Pay and Fulton III, who is a different Fulton. Morris and Kwan are a genuinely separate laboratory, six years earlier, and they contradict Fulton in print on other materials - which makes their agreement about where the whole wax sits worth more than a second reading by the same hand, and still leaves this family resting on two laboratories and fewer than a hundred rabbits. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ON THIS PAGE IS WHAT WE HAVE NOT READ. Mills and Kligman, in the Archives of Dermatology in 1982, ran both a rabbit ear and a HUMAN BACK model with cyanoacrylate follicular biopsy, on a 0-to-3 scale. Secondary accounts of that paper report it naming acetylated lanolin alcohols and lanolin fatty acids among its most comedogenic materials. We have not read its table, so we do not carry its numbers and we are not going to describe what it found in our own voice - but it is the obvious place human data on this family would live, an unread table is not an empty one, and a reader deserves to know that the strongest potential evidence AGAINST the reassuring half of this page is a document we could not open. The same applies to Kligman and Mills 1972 and to Lanzet 1986, both on a 0-to-3 scale, both quoted for lanolin derivatives, neither read here. A number on the wrong scale, from a paper we have not opened, would add the appearance of corroboration and none of it. Nguyen and colleagues' 2007 rabbit-ear paper, on a 0-to-4 scale, is a fourth we have not opened. We hold its abstract verbatim and nothing further. The abstract names fourteen materials it quantifies and says the first nine were deemed positive; no lanolin is among the fourteen. What its table holds beyond those fourteen we do not know, so this is an absence in an abstract, and we are not going to promote it into an absence in the paper. WE IDENTIFIED NO HUMAN COMEDONE STUDY THAT ISOLATES ANY ONE MEMBER OF THIS FAMILY. What exists, in the sources we searched, tests finished formulas. Waranuch and colleagues (2021) counted microcomedones from epidermal biopsies on the upper backs of fifteen healthy men over four weeks, across four creams that ALL contained lanolin - so there was no lanolin-versus-no-lanolin comparison anywhere in it, no concentration is reported, and the study was designed around vitamin E. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's 2024 report adds two more of the same kind - hydroxylated lanolin at 6 per cent in cottonseed oil judged non-comedogenic in a rabbit study, and a finished product containing lanolin at an unreported concentration judged non-comedogenic in a fifteen-subject randomised trial. Hydroxylated lanolin is not one of our five, and none of these isolates anything. Unproven is not disproven, in this direction as much as the other. A CONCENTRATION CLAIM CIRCULATES FOR ONE MEMBER AND WE ARE NOT CARRYING IT. Charts and explainers report that acetylated lanolin alcohol grades high neat and much lower diluted to a few per cent, and attribute the series to Draelos and DiNardo's 2006 re-evaluation. We have not been able to read that paper's methods, and this project has already printed a sibling dilution series attributed to the same document, failed to find it there, and retracted it. So we report only that the claim is in circulation and that we have not traced it to a table we have read. What we can say from the papers we do hold is the narrower thing said above: the five readings at 4 or above in this family were taken under four different preparations, and none of the three papers repeats one of them at a second. THE CHARTS DO NOT ALL COLLAPSE THE DISTINCTION, and it would be convenient for us to say they did. The most carefully sourced chart we looked at, Lab Muffin's 2019 comedogenicity table, marks each figure with the paper it came from and prints acetylated lanolin and acetylated lanolin alcohol as two separate entries, at 0 and at 4-5 respectively - the exact distinction this site spent a fact-check establishing. Where even that chart loses something is finer: its lanolin alcohol cell reads 0-2 and carries both source marks, where Fulton prints 0-2* and Morris and Kwan print 1-2 for a sample at 30 per cent in mineral oil. When two readings are merged into one cell, the dilution note and the asterisk are what go. We checked a small number of charts and we are not going to tell you what all of them print. WHAT THE FAMILY-LEVEL FACT DOES NOT ESTABLISH. It is a fact about the EVIDENCE, not about pores: it says the twenty-one rows describe fourteen materials rather than one, not that any of those materials is safe. It does not license reading one row onto another, which is the specific thing a shared name invites. It says nothing about isopropyl lanolate beyond its single reading, since only one of the three papers tested it. It cannot rank the members against each other, because they were not all tested by the same laboratory, at the same concentration, in the same vehicle, or against the same key. And it says nothing at all about allergy: lanolin is a documented contact allergen and was the American Contact Dermatitis Society's Allergen of the Year in 2023, which is a different endpoint from follicular plugging and is handled separately on the lanolin page. AND THE CAVEAT UNDER ALL OF IT, ours included. A 2025 review in JAAD Reviews, surveying the field from 1972 onward, found that no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated label. A family-wide generalisation is precisely the kind of claim this site was built to distrust, and writing one is this page type's characteristic failure. What we are asserting is bounded and checkable: twenty-one rows in three tables we have read, the three passages of Fulton's prose that touch this family - the two in which he explains his own positives away and the one in which he asserts the generalisation we decline - and the fact that for the samples that scored highest the papers do not say what was in the jar.
All 5 lanolin & derivatives we rate
The legacy score is printed exactly as it appears in the paper, including the ranges, the asterisks and the parentheses. Those marks are not decoration. They are the paper telling you what its own number is worth.
Sources
- Fulton JE. "Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products." J Soc Cosmet Chem 40:321-333 (1989) The largest of the rabbit-ear tables and the source of most comedogenic numbers in circulation. A survey, not a controlled trial: the ingredient at roughly 10 per cent in propylene glycol, about 1 ml to the inner ear of three New Zealand albino rabbits, five days a week for two weeks, follicular keratosis measured with a dial micrometer, graded 0-5 with the key 0-1 not significant, 2-3 borderline, 4-5 positive. Read off a transcription of all 220 rows made visually at 400dpi from the journal scan, because OCR drops the numeric columns. Three things on this page come out of it and out of nothing else: its ten lanolin rows with their exact ranges and asterisks; the three prose passages that bear on this family, being the two in which he explains away both of the rows that reach his positive band and the page-323 sentence in which he says the classic anhydrous lanolins are not as comedogenic as the moderately ethoxylated derivatives; and the printing of the source-variability asterisk on three individual lanolin rows, which is as much as we can report of it, because those rows were transcribed without their section heading. One author, one laboratory, no replication, and he called the survey "not at all definitive".
- Fulton JE, Pay SR, Fulton JE III. "Comedogenicity of current therapeutic products, cosmetics, and ingredients in the rabbit ear." J Am Acad Dermatol 10(1):96-105 (1984) The earlier rabbit-ear table from the same laboratory, and note the authorship - Fulton JE Jr, Pay SR and Fulton JE III, three names and two different Fultons. Read in full from a print copy obtained in July 2026 - two rabbits per test, one ear dosed daily for two weeks against the opposite ear as control, the material used as is where it was a liquid or soft solid, the starred rows diluted with mineral oil or carried in an alcohol gel at 10 per cent. It is NOT independent corroboration in any sense but the date. Its key differs from the 1989 key and the difference is load-bearing: here 1 to 2 is not significant and 3 or above is positive, so a 3 is positive in this paper and borderline in the other, and its four lanolin rows must be read under it. Cited chiefly because it is the awkward one. Its section on lanolins prints anhydrous lanolin 2, lanolin alcohol 2, ethoxylated lanolin 3 and a single undivided row for the plain acetylated ester at 4, with no separate alcohol row anywhere in the paper, and its abstract states that "lanolins continue to be a problem, especially derivatives such as acetylated or ethoxylated lanolins."
- Morris WE, Kwan SC. "Use of the rabbit ear model in evaluating the comedogenic potential of cosmetic ingredients." J Soc Cosmet Chem 34:215-225 (1983) The one genuinely independent rabbit-ear assay of the era - a different laboratory, six years before Fulton's famous table, on the same 0-5 scale, and willing to contradict him in print on other materials. Its method is the rabbit ear canal, three rabbits, fourteen applications, undiluted unless a dilution is stated, graded microscopically. Seven of its thirty-two rows are lanolin materials, which makes it the densest lanolin dataset in the corpus and the only paper that tested a whole commercial lanolin under a named trade grade, scoring it 0. Its two highest lanolin rows are the acetylated lanolin alcohol, which Morris and Kwan grade 4-5, and lanolin acid at 50 per cent in mineral oil, graded 4. WHAT WE HOLD OF IT IS ITS TABLE AND ONE SENTENCE OF ITS PROSE. That sentence is from its discussion of sodium lauryl sulfate, where it says its own noncomedogenic finding conflicts with the high scores published by Fulton. We have not read the rest of the discussion, so we do not know what it attributed its two high lanolin readings to, and we do not claim it names no additive - only that we have read no passage in which it names one. We hold no grading key for it either, so we report its digits without translating them into anyone's bands.
- Cosmetic Ingredient Review. "Amended Safety Assessment of Lanolin and Lanolin-Derived Ingredients as Used in Cosmetics" - FINAL AMENDED REPORT, released 21 November 2024 An INDUSTRY-FUNDED expert-panel review of the whole lanolin literature - the CIR panel is convened and funded by the cosmetics industry's own trade association, which is not a reason to discount it and is a reason to say so. It is also a SAFETY assessment rather than a comedogenicity one - its endpoints are toxicological, irritation and sensitisation, and a panel concluding a material is safe as used has said nothing about whether it plugs a follicle. Cited for two things only: that it keeps the members of this family apart on paper, with separate ingredient names, CAS numbers and manufacturing routes, which is the documentary basis for treating them as different materials; and for the two comedogenicity results it does report, both of which are finished or diluted formulations rather than isolated members - hydroxylated lanolin at 6 per cent in cottonseed oil, and a lanolin-containing product in a fifteen-subject trial. This is the FINAL report, and the status line on its cover page is the reason we can say so: "Final Amended Report, Release Date: November 21, 2024". This project has three times cited a comment-stage CIR document as though it were settled, once on this very family, so the version is named deliberately.
- Mitra SK, Seshadri JS, Venkatesh U, Venkataranganna MV, Gopumadhavan S, Sundaram R. "Experimental evaluation of a herbal cream (SK-AC) on acetylated lanolin alcohol-induced acne in rabbit." Indian J Dermatol 43(4):162-164 (1998) ABSTRACT ONLY - we have not read the paper, and we take nothing numeric from it. It is not a comedogenicity measurement of any member of this family; it is a trial of a herbal cream, in four groups of rabbits, in which a member of this family is the reagent used to induce comedogenesis in the ear canal so that the cream could be tested against it. Cited for that status and nothing else: by 1998 acetylated lanolin alcohol was being used as the thing that reliably produces the lesion rather than as the thing under test. The animal count, the concentration and the vehicle are not in the abstract, and an ingredient's use as an induction agent is a statement about a laboratory convention, not a dose a reader will meet.
- Wong M. "How to Use Comedogenicity Ratings." Lab Muffin Beauty Science, 21 February 2019 (comedogenicity chart, read 2026-08-21) A republisher of the legacy numbers, and the most carefully sourced one we looked at - it prints a source mark against each figure distinguishing Fulton 1989 from Morris and Kwan 1983, which almost none of the charts do. It is NOT an independent measurement and it is not corroboration; every lanolin figure on it traces to the two papers above. Cited for a specific reason and against our own interest: it prints acetylated lanolin and acetylated lanolin alcohol as two separate entries, at 0 and at 4-5 respectively, so the collapse this site is best known for correcting is not something every chart commits. Its lanolin alcohol cell, reading 0-2 and carrying both source marks where the two papers print 0-2* and 1-2 at 30 per cent in mineral oil, is the finer loss - the dilution note and the asterisk - and is the reason we describe it rather than simply approving of it.
- "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals: a review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews (2025) A recent peer-reviewed review of the whole field, covering the literature from 1972 onward. Finds that no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated label. It is a synthesis of the legacy corpus rather than a new measurement, and independent of Fulton only in authorship. Cited for the field-wide caveat that sits under every number on this page, and under this page's own generalisation just as hard. We were not able to open its tables, so nothing here is taken from them.