Lanolin

Lanolin is rated Caution as a precaution, not a finding — no assay in the corpus we searched found whole lanolin comedogenic. Fulton scored anhydrous lanolin 0–1* in 1989 and 2 in 1984, and both readings sit below the line the paper printing them drew. The famous 4 was never whole lanolin's, and it is not one derivative's either: at least three Fulton rows carrying the name print a 4, and every one of them is a derivative. This is the entry we have got wrong most often, and every correction is on the page.

What it is

A wax scoured from sheep's wool — the sheep's own skin secretion, not a plant fat and not a triglyceride oil. Chemically it is a mixture rather than a molecule: the Cosmetic Ingredient Review's 2024 assessment describes high-molecular-weight esters as roughly 87% of a typical sample, dominated by esters of sterols, triterpene alcohols and aliphatic alcohols, with free alcohols, sterols, fatty acids and hydrocarbons making up the rest. That "typical" is doing real work — the proportions shift with the flock, the fleece and the refining, and no two commercial lanolins are quite the same material. Formulators reach for it as an occlusive emollient with unusual water-holding behaviour. The 2023 review in Cutis reports that it can hold roughly twice its weight in water and reduce transepidermal water loss by 20–30%, which is why it is the default ingredient in ointment bases, nipple creams and diaper creams rather than a texture choice. It is often described as the emollient closest to human sebum, and structurally that is defensible — sebum is also a wax-ester-rich secretion — but "resembles sebum" is a claim about composition, not a finding about pores, and it should not be quietly upgraded into one.

Why we rate it Caution

We rate it Caution at Low confidence. Read that as a precaution, not a finding — because no test in the corpus we searched found whole lanolin comedogenic, and we want to be the ones who tell you that. Start with the correction, because it is the most useful thing on this page. Until 12 July 2026 we rated lanolin Clogging with a legacy score of 4, and cited acne.org for it. That was wrong. When we finally read Fulton's 1989 table off a render of the original journal scan rather than trusting a list that quotes it, there was no row for plain "Lanolin" at all — and no document we hold scores whole lanolin a 4. What we said next was tidier than the record. We told you the circulating 4 was one particular derivative's, read across onto the parent. In fact at least three Fulton rows carrying the name lanolin print a 4 — acetylated lanolin alcohol and PEG-16 lanolin in the 1989 table, and, in the 1984 table, the plain acetylated ester itself, which that paper never splits into ester and alcohol at all. Morris and Kwan put a 4 on an isolated lanolin ACID fraction as well. Which of those the figure on a modern list descends from, if any single one of them does, is not something we can trace, and we should not have implied we had. What they have in common is the only thing this page needs, and it is untouched: not one of them is whole lanolin. We had taken a derivative's score and attached it to the parent. That is precisely the failure this site exists to point out in other people's ingredient lists, and we were doing it in our own data. What the legacy assays actually found — and there is more than one of them, which is a correction in itself. James Fulton's 1989 paper is the biggest table, not the first and not the only one, and we said otherwise on this page until an external reviewer caught us. Fulton's method: ingredients diluted to about 10% in propylene glycol, applied to the inner ear of New Zealand albino rabbits, three rabbits per assay, five days a week for two weeks, follicles scored for keratosis. His Table I carries ten lanolin-family rows. Anhydrous lanolin 0–1. Lanolin oil 0–1. Lanolin wax 1. Acetylated lanolin 0. Lanolin alcohol 0–2. PEG-75 lanolin 0. Laneth-10 2. PPG-12/PEG-65 lanolin oil 2. Only acetylated lanolin alcohol and PEG-16 lanolin reach 4, and Fulton attributes both, in his own text, to non-lanolin additives — cetyl acetate in the first case, ceteth-16, oleth-16 and steareth-16 in the second. His own grading key says 0–1 "is not considered significant." Fulton scored this family twice, and until this correction the second time appeared nowhere on this page. Five years before the table above, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Fulton, Pay and Fulton (1984) printed a shorter Lanolins section — four rows, and a different key. Anhydrous lanolin 2. Lanolin alcohol 2. Acetylated lanolin — the plain ester, which the 1984 paper never splits from the alcohol — 4. Ethoxylated lanolin 3. That paper's own key reads "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 the 2 he printed against anhydrous lanolin is a non-finding under the key printed beside it — the same verdict as the 1989 range, reached from a different digit — while the two derivatives in that section are positive under it. Read each paper under its own key or the numbers stop meaning anything: a 3 is positive in 1984 and merely borderline in 1989. Note what NEITHER paper prints: a row called "Lanolin." Our legacy score is 0–1*, the range he printed against ANHYDROUS lanolin, and it is not a 1. We published it as a 1 for a day. A range is not a point, the asterisk is not decoration — it means "results depend on source of raw material" — and rounding a qualified range into a clean number is a smaller version of the exact error that put a 4 on this page in the first place. Earlier still than either Fulton paper, Morris and Kwan (1983) ran their own 0–5 assay, and they tested a whole commercial lanolin they were willing to name — something neither Fulton table does. Lanolin (Super Corona): 0. Lanolin oils: 0–1 and 1. They also took the material apart, and the isolated lanolin-ACID fraction, at 50% in mineral oil, scored 4. We cited that 4 as the basis of this rating and did not mention the 0 — from the same table, on the same page, about the material actually in the jar. That is not a technicality. It is the same selective reading we accuse the comedogenic lists of, and it is the second time in a week we have been caught doing it. So why Caution, and not Clear? Not because anything found lanolin comedogenic. Every whole-material result we hold is a non-finding, and after reading the 1984 paper there are four of them rather than three: Fulton 0–1* in 1989, Fulton 2 in 1984 — below that paper's own significance line — Morris and Kwan 0, and the one human trial we can find, which classed its lanolin-containing product non-comedogenic. A second Fulton reading did not move the verdict. It widened the agreement, and it is worth saying that the added number is the higher of the two and still changes nothing. So the Caution does not come from a number, and nothing on this page should be read as though it did. It is a precaution, and it rests on two things we can name and cannot measure. Commercial lanolin is not one material — Fulton's asterisk is a statement about the sheep and the refinery, not about the molecule, and what reaches a label as "lanolin" is a natural wax of unstated grade — and the one fraction of it that does test positive, the lanolin acids, is genuinely present in it. We cannot tell you how much. A reader buying a jar has no way of knowing which lanolin is in it, and neither do we. That is the whole argument. If it does not convince you, you are reading it correctly, and Low confidence is us saying so.

What the evidence doesn’t tell you

There is no study anywhere that applies lanolin at a known concentration to human faces and counts comedones. That study does not exist, and its absence is the actual state of the evidence. The human trial we do have is thin, and thinner than we first described it. Waranuch and colleagues (2021) ran a double-blind randomised study on the upper back: four Blackmores vitamin E creams, applied three times a week for four weeks, microcomedones counted from epidermal biopsies, twelve subjects analysed. We originally called one of them "the lanolin arm." It was not. Reading the paper's own formulation table, ALL FOUR creams contain lanolin — three carry it as an excipient and the fourth, the "+Lanolin" product, carries it as an active. There was no lanolin-versus-no-lanolin comparison anywhere in the trial. Microcomedone counts did fall about 24% on the "+Lanolin" cream, but they fell about 26% on Firm & Smooth, which also contains lanolin, and rose about 14% on Skin Barrier, which also contains lanolin. All four were classed non-comedogenic; the octyl palmitate positive control raised counts sharply. What this trial supports is narrow and we will state it narrowly: four finished creams that all contained lanolin did not induce comedones on twelve people's backs over four weeks. It does not isolate lanolin, it never reports its concentration, it was designed to test vitamin E, and the back is not the face. The mechanism behind our own rating is itself unquantified, and we should say so rather than lean on it. Morris and Kwan's 4 is a fraction — the lanolin acids, at 50% in mineral oil — not commercial lanolin, and the same paper scored commercial lanolin 0. We do not know what proportion of those acids any given jar carries, whether the labels "lanolin," "anhydrous lanolin" and "wool fat" track that proportion at all, or whether the acids behave the same way inside the whole wax as they do isolated from it in a solvent. Our Caution is a statement about a variability we can name and cannot measure. It is the weakest kind of reason we are willing to publish, and we would rather print it plainly than dress it as evidence. The assay everything rests on is contested in general, and here it cuts in the awkward direction. Draelos and DiNardo's 2006 re-evaluation found rabbit-ear results do not reliably transfer to human skin; the 2025 JAAD Reviews survey of the field found no standardised comedogenicity test exists at all. On this page those objections undermine a reassuring number as readily as an alarming one, which is uncomfortable and worth saying out loud. Separately, and importantly: lanolin is a documented contact allergen. The American Contact Dermatitis Society named it Allergen of the Year in 2023, and the North American Contact Dermatitis Group found 3.3% of 43,691 patch-tested patients reacted to it between 2001 and 2018 — a referral population, not a general one, against a European general-population figure of about 0.4%. Kligman argued in 1998 that even that is inflated by patch-test false positives. All of this is a different question from comedogenicity. An allergen is not a pore-clogger, a pore-clogger is not an allergen, and the two get conflated on this ingredient more than on any other. Porecelain handles allergy as a separate feature, and this rating says nothing about it.

Where you’ll see it

Ointment bases, nipple creams, diaper and barrier creams, hand and foot balms, lip balms and lipstick, and thick "restorative" moisturisers for cracked skin — the products where occlusion is the point. It also appears in makeup, shaving creams, shampoos and conditioners. The Cutis review puts the permitted range in US over-the-counter products at 12.5% to 50%, high enough that it will usually sit near the top of an ingredient list when it is present at all. On a label it may be called Lanolin, Anhydrous Lanolin, Wool Fat, Adeps Lanae, Wool Wax or Wool Grease. Those are all this ingredient, and the checker now recognises all of them — until this correction it did not, and a jar of "Adeps Lanae" would have scanned clean by simply not being seen. One name is deliberately excluded: Wool Alcohols is NOT lanolin. It is Lanolin Alcohol, a different material with its own rating, which Fulton scored 0–2. Folding it in here would repeat the exact parent-versus-derivative error this page was rewritten to correct. The same goes for Lanolin Oil, Lanolin Wax, Acetylated Lanolin, Acetylated Lanolin Alcohol, PEG-16 Lanolin and Isopropyl Lanolate — the label word "lanolin" covers a family whose members Fulton scored anywhere from 0 to 4, and the siblings we rate separately are separate for a reason.

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, read in full off a 300dpi render of the journal scan rather than via a list that quotes it. The rabbit-ear assay that produced the 0–5 comedogenic scale nearly every site 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. Its Table I is what corrected our rating: no row for plain "Lanolin" at all, anhydrous lanolin 0–1, lanolin oil 0–1, lanolin wax 1, acetylated lanolin 0, lanolin alcohol 0–2, with the 4s reserved for acetylated lanolin alcohol and PEG-16 lanolin, both of which Fulton attributes to non-lanolin additives. Note his footnote on the ranges: "Results depend on source of raw material."
2. Fulton JE, Pay SR, Fulton JE III. "Comedogenicity of current therapeutic products, cosmetics, and ingredients in the rabbit ear." J Am Acad Dermatol 10:96–105 (1984) The same author's EARLIER rabbit-ear table, read in full off a 400dpi render of a print copy obtained 18 July 2026 — and, until this correction, cited nowhere on this page at all, which is itself an error worth naming: a second Fulton reading of this family existed and our own lanolin entry did not know about it. Its Lanolins section has four rows. Anhydrous lanolin 2. Lanolin alcohol 2. Ethoxylated lanolin 3. And the plain acetylated ester at 4, with no separate "acetylated lanolin alcohol" row anywhere in the paper — that split is a refinement Fulton made only in 1989. Its key is NOT the 1989 key: "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 the 2 against anhydrous lanolin is a non-finding under the key it was printed beside, and it is the fourth whole-material reading behind our statement that nothing we hold found whole lanolin comedogenic. Method: two rabbits per test, the ingredient applied to the inner surface of one ear daily for two weeks, the opposite ear as control.
3. Kligman AM. "Petrolatum is not comedogenic in rabbits or humans: A critical reappraisal of the rabbit ear assay and the concept of 'acne cosmetica'." J Soc Cosmet Chem 47:41–48 (1996) The man who invented the rabbit-ear assay, repudiating what it produced. Read in full. It is a PETROLATUM study — two groups of ten acne patients, refined petrolatum and a 30% petrolatum cream, twice daily for eight weeks — and it contains no lanolin experiment whatsoever. Cited here for exactly one thing: his verdict on his own 1972 method, which tested inside the ear canal with no control biopsy, and without which "many materials will be falsely labeled as comedogenic." He calls its positives for the bland greases false positives. He did not retract the 1972 paper; he corrected the assay in a 1990 publication. We previously used this citation to make a specific quantitative claim about acetylated lanolin and a 15% threshold. No such experiment is in it. We had attached a real paper to a claim it does not make, which is the worst failure mode available to a site like this one and the hardest to see from the inside.
4. Kligman AM, Mills OH. "Acne cosmetica." Arch Dermatol 106:843–850 (1972) The origin of the whole "pore-clogging cosmetics" idea. Cited here as the thing its own author spent 1996 dismantling, not as support. We have NOT been able to read its table from the primary document, so we do not tell you what grade of lanolin it tested, at what concentration, or what it scored — and we previously implied we knew. A reader who finds lanolin on a modern pore-clogging list is, at three or four removes, reading this paper, which is the only reason it appears here at all.
5. 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) An INDEPENDENT primary assay on the same 0–5 scale, six years BEFORE Fulton — not a republisher of him, and it contradicts him in print. It tested lanolin both ways, and we previously told you only about one of them. Whole commercial lanolin (Super Corona) scored 0. The isolated lanolin-ACID fraction, at 50% in mineral oil, scored 4. Our Caution rests on that 4, and the honest presentation is that the SAME PAPER scored the material in the jar a zero. A fraction in a solvent is not a jar of lanolin, and we cannot say how much of it any commercial lanolin carries. This citation is the strongest evidence against our own rating as well as the only evidence for it, and it belongs on the page as both.
6. Cosmetic Ingredient Review. "Amended Safety Assessment of Lanolin and Lanolin-Derived Ingredients as Used in Cosmetics" — FINAL AMENDED REPORT, released 21 November 2024 An independent expert-panel review of the whole lanolin literature, not a comedogenic list and not downstream of Fulton. Source of the composition figures used above. Its comedogenicity section is honest about how little there is — it notes that older reports of acnegenic effects did not record the concentrations tested, and it is where we found the 2021 human trial.
7. Waranuch N, Wisutthathum S, Tuanthai S, et al. "Safety assessment on comedogenicity of dermatological products containing d-alpha tocopheryl acetate in Asian subjects — a double-blind randomized controlled trial." Contemp Clin Trials Commun 23:100834 (2021) The only human comedogenicity trial we could find in which a lanolin-containing product was an arm. Human upper back, four weeks, microcomedones counted from epidermal biopsy, octyl palmitate as a working positive control. The lanolin arm was non-comedogenic. Cited with its limits stated — twelve subjects analysed, lanolin concentration unreported, finished product, and the study was designed around vitamin E, not lanolin.
8. Johnson H, Norman T, Adler BL, Yu JD. "Lanolin — the 2023 American Contact Dermatitis Society Allergen of the Year." Cutis 112:78–81 (2023) A peer-reviewed review of lanolin as a contact allergen — a different question from comedogenicity, cited here so the two are not confused. Source of the water-holding, TEWL and permitted-concentration figures. Also documents the "lanolin paradox" first described by Wolf in 1996 — lanolin tends to provoke reactions on already-inflamed skin while sparing intact skin — and notes that allergy risk concentrates in stasis dermatitis, chronic leg ulcers, atopic dermatitis and perianal or genital dermatitis.
9. Silverberg JI, Patel N, Warshaw EM, et al. "Lanolin allergic reactions — North American Contact Dermatitis Group experience, 2001 to 2018." Dermatitis 33:193–199 (2022) The primary epidemiology behind the allergen claim. 43,691 patch-tested patients; 1,431 (3.3%) positive. These are patients referred for patch testing, so the figure is not a general population rate — the European general-population figure reported in the Cutis review is 0.4%. Nothing here speaks to pores.
10. Kligman AM. "The myth of lanolin allergy." Contact Dermatitis 39:103–107 (1998) The dermatological defence of lanolin, from the co-author of the original acne cosmetica work. Argues that lanolin is at most a weak sensitiser and that the allergy literature is inflated by patch-test false positives. Cited because it is the strongest published statement of the case for lanolin, and because a reader deserves to see that the disagreement here is between dermatologists, not between dermatologists and the internet.
11. Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept." J Am Acad Dermatol 54:507–512 (2006) Peer-reviewed rebuttal of the assay every rating on this site rests on. Argues rabbit-ear results do not reliably predict comedogenicity in human skin, and that testing an isolated ingredient says little about a finished formula. On this page it cuts in the unusual direction — it undermines a low score as readily as a high one.
12. "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 no standardised comedogenicity test exists and that "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated label. 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.
13. acne.org comedogenic ingredient list Republishes the Fulton scores. Not an independent measurement and not corroboration — the same is true of CosDNA, Face Reality and Banish, which are one source quoted four times. Listed here for a specific reason: it was cited in our own ratings file as the grounds for calling lanolin Clogging at a 4, and it does not say that. It does not list plain lanolin on either of its lists at all. The citation was checked and the rating did not survive the check.

Others in the same family

Lanolin & derivatives 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 lanolin & derivatives as a family ›

• Acetylated Lanolin Caution Low
• Acetylated Lanolin Alcohol Clogging Low
• Isopropyl Lanolate Caution Low
• PEG-16 Lanolin Clogging Low

Last reviewed 2026-08-20 · How we decide

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