Porecelain

Flawless skin starts with the fine print.

Rosehip Oil

"Rosehip oil" is a market name covering three species and two different parts of the plant, and no comedogenicity assay we can find has tested any of them. The "0 to 1 per Fulton" that circulates for it is attributed to a paper with no rosehip row in it: "rose" occurs in Fulton's 220-row table exactly once, inside "evening primrose oil", a different plant in a different family. We rate it Clear on the absence of evidence against it, which is weaker and different from a test it passed.

Clear Low confidence No legacy score. It does not appear in the assay corpus we searched.

An umbrella name for 3 species and 2 plant parts. No assay of any of them that we can find.

What it is

Not one substance. A name. Every rating on this site is a claim about a material, and this one is a claim about a shelf. "Rosehip oil" covers at least three species and two different parts of the plant, and we give it a single rating for one reason only: THE ANSWER IS THE SAME FOR ALL OF THEM. Nobody we can find has assayed any rosehip material, of any species, from either the seed or the fruit, in either direction. The rating is an absence, and the absence is uniform. That is the only thing that makes one verdict honest here, and if a single assay of a single species ever appears, this entry has to break apart. An oil pressed from the seed inside the hip — the fruit — of a wild rose. Which wild rose depends on who pressed it. The INCI name our own database carries is Rosa Canina Fruit Oil, the European dog rose; the Chilean and Argentinian trade that made the oil famous sells rosa mosqueta, which is Rosa rubiginosa or Rosa moschata. On a label the reader may meet Rosa Canina Fruit Oil, Rosa Canina Seed Oil, Rosa Rubiginosa Seed Oil or Rosa Moschata Seed Oil, and those are not guaranteed to be the same material. The seed oil is dominated by three C18 fatty acids. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review's composition table for Rosa canina seed oil gives linoleic acid at 54.41 ± 3.24%, with α-linolenic and oleic acid making up most of the rest; CIR also states plainly that the composition of the fruit varies with cultivar, growing region, climate, maturity, cultivation practice and storage. Hold on to the difference between the seed and the fruit, because the label does not. The same CIR report gives a fatty-acid analysis of Rosa canina fruit — the whole hip, of which fat is only 1.78% — as lauric acid 4.8%, palmitic acid 16.4%, linoleic acid 16% and α-linolenic acid 40.5%. That is not the seed oil's profile, and it contains a mid-chain fatty acid the seed oil is not usually said to have. We are not going to build an argument on that, in either direction, because nobody we can find has assayed either material. It is worth knowing that "Fruit Oil" on a label and a seed-oil fatty-acid profile in a marketing paragraph are two different claims. One property is not in dispute and matters for storage rather than pores: the oil is heavily polyunsaturated, and polyunsaturated oils oxidise. The authors of the only facial trial we found note that it is susceptible to oxidation on exposure to light and air.

Why we rate it Clear

We rate it Clear at Low confidence, because there is nothing here to be confident about in either direction. This page was drafted while our ratings file still printed Moderate for it — an unearned tier we have since corrected across the whole database (D89), and this page is one of the three that caught it. Start with the number, because the number is the reason to write this page. Rosehip oil circulates with a comedogenic rating of 1, or 0 to 1, or 1 to 2, or 2, and on at least one chart 3 to 4, and a great many of the pages printing it name James Fulton's scale as the authority. We rendered Table I of Fulton 1989 at 400 dpi and transcribed all 220 rows visually. There is no rosehip row. There is no Rosa canina row, no rose hip row, no rosa mosqueta row. The string "rose" appears in that table exactly once, inside "Evening primrose oil", graded 3 — and evening primrose is Oenothera biennis, a plant in the Onagraceae, not a rose at all. This is not a misread of an adjacent row, which is the usual way these numbers go wrong. There is no row to misread. The number was attached to the paper by someone who had not opened it. The other complete 0-to-5 table we hold does not have it either. Morris and Kwan 1983 tested nine vegetable oils in the rabbit ear — olive 0, avocado 0, castor 0 to 1, corn 0 to 1, sesame 1, safflower 1 to 2, peach kernel 2, grape seed 2 to 3, sweet almond 3 — and rosehip is not among them. Both papers are rabbit-ear assays in any case, and Fulton's own key would matter if a score existed: 0 to 1 "is not considered significant", 2 to 3 is "borderline", 4 to 5 is "considered positive." Then the document where a result would have to appear if one existed. Rosa Canina Fruit Oil is not one of the twelve ingredients in the CIR's 2017 safety assessment of Rosa canina-derived ingredients — that report says so itself, and points to the review that did cover it: the CIR's assessment of 244 plant-derived fatty acid oils, which lists both Rosa canina fruit oil and hydrogenated Rosa canina fruit oil in its ingredient table. That assessment states that the safety focus for these oils is irritation and sensitisation. We read the published version and found no comedogenicity data in it for this oil. The 2017 Rosa canina report does not contain the string "comedo" at all. There is human data on rosehip oil and a human face, and two things have to be said about it before anything else. It tested ROSA CANINA SEED OIL. Our own database entry carries Rosa Canina FRUIT Oil as a label name, and CIR's tables give the seed and the whole hip different fatty-acid profiles — the fruit's includes 4.8% lauric acid, which on this site is the peak of the comedogenic curve. So this study is not a study of every material on this page, and we are not going to let it stand as one. With that said, it is worth being precise about what it is, because it is the kind of study that gets converted into a clean bill of health. Oargă and colleagues, at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca, published a pilot study in Cosmetics in June 2025: 27 volunteers, 23 women and 4 men, all with normal skin, applying three drops of cold-pressed Rosa canina seed oil to the whole face daily for five weeks. It is open-label, single-arm and uncontrolled, and the authors say all three of those things themselves. Every endpoint was read off a VISIA imaging system: wrinkles, texture, spots, brown spots, UV spots, red areas, porphyrins, pores, and a simulated skin age. Nobody in that study counted a comedone. The word does not appear in the paper. Anyone with a skin condition that could confound the result was screened out, so no acne-prone skin was enrolled. Its VISIA "pore" scores did not move significantly — and that is a surface-image metric read by a camera, not a follicular biopsy, and the paper contradicts itself about it, with a Discussion claiming a significant reduction that its own Results section and its own tables call non-significant. So this study does not clear rosehip oil, it does not condemn it, and it must not be presented as having tested the question. It is a wrinkle study. Unproven is not disproven, and we have made that mistake on this site before. Finally, the mechanism, and why we are not leaning on it. The argument everyone reaches for is that rosehip oil is high in linoleic acid, and that linoleic acid is the "good" fatty acid for acne-prone skin. The real finding behind that is Downing and colleagues, 1986: people with acne have low linoleate in their skin-surface lipid, and the authors proposed that the dilution imposes a state of essential fatty-acid deficiency on the follicular epithelium and induces hyperkeratosis. That is a hypothesis about the sebum a person's own gland secretes, not a finding about an oil applied on top of it, and it was offered as a hypothesis. Worse for the argument, the assay data we hold do not track fatty-acid class at all: olive oil is oleic-dominant and Morris and Kwan scored it 0, sweet almond scored 3, and safflower — one of the most linoleic oils in commerce — scored 1 to 2, not 0. A rule that cannot predict the results already in the table is not a rule we can use to predict a result that isn't. So the Clear rests on two things and we will name both: nothing measures this oil, and nothing we found argues against it. That is a default, not a verdict.

What the evidence doesn’t tell you

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the two produce the same silence. We searched the corpus we hold — Fulton 1989 in full, Morris and Kwan 1983 in full, the seven other numeric documents in our legacy-assays file — and we found no rosehip oil anywhere in it, in either direction. We identified no rabbit-ear assay, no human comedone count and no cyanoacrylate follicular biopsy of this oil. If somebody ran the assay tomorrow, we have no grounds on which to predict the answer, and no grounds on which to be surprised by it. One gap in our own reading, stated plainly. JAAD Reviews published a peer-reviewed review of the comedogenicity literature in December 2025 whose Table I prints rabbit-ear scores for a list of cosmetic materials. We could not retrieve that table — the publisher blocks the full text from us — so we do not know whether it prints a rosehip row. If it does, it would not be a measurement: on the one row from that table we have been able to check against its own cited source, the score is not in the source. But we have not read it, and we are not going to imply that we have. "Rosehip oil" is a name, not a substance. It covers at least three species, the seed and the fruit, cold-pressed and refined grades, and fresh and oxidised oil — the material is heavily polyunsaturated and degrades in light and air, and oxidised oil is not chemically the same thing that went into the bottle. We found no comedogenicity work comparing any of those, because we found no comedogenicity work at all. The human study on this page is a wrinkle study in 27 people with normal skin, and its authors list its own weaknesses before we do: no control group, no blinding, small sample, five weeks. It did not measure sebum, it did not count comedones, and it enrolled nobody with acne-prone skin. It cannot be read as a safety result for the readers most likely to be asking this question. It did record that redness rose in several individuals and roughly doubled in one, which is an irritation signal and not a comedogenicity signal, and we mention it only so that the study is not left looking cleaner than it is.

Where you’ll see it

Commonly as the entire product — a single-ingredient facial oil sold under the name of the plant — and in serums, "repair" and scar oils and night oils. Those are illustrative categories, not a measured prevalence: we have not audited the market and we are not going to put a number on it that we did not count. What matters more is the label itself. You may meet Rosa Canina Fruit Oil, Rosa Canina Seed Oil, Rosa Rubiginosa Seed Oil, Rosa Moschata Seed Oil, rosa mosqueta, or simply "rosehip oil". Our checker now recognises all of them and sends every one to this page — which is the honest thing to do, because we have no assay for any of them, and because until today it recognised only two and returned nothing at all for the rest. The CIR reviewed the fruit oil and its hydrogenated form as cosmetic ingredients; the seed oil is covered in a different report. Two names, two documents, one shelf.

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 220-row rabbit-ear table nearly every comedogenic number online descends from, and the source most often named when rosehip oil is given a score. Method: the ingredient at roughly 10% in propylene glycol, applied to the inner ear of three New Zealand albino rabbits, follicles scored for keratosis on a 0-to-5 scale. Cited here entirely for what it does not contain. We transcribed all 220 rows visually from 400 dpi renders, because OCR drops the numeric columns. There is no rosehip row, and the only occurrence of "rose" in the table is inside "Evening primrose oil", a different plant, graded 3. Fulton called his own survey "not at all definitive but simply designed to stimulate research."
  2. 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 other complete 0-to-5 rabbit-ear table we hold: 32 materials, including nine vegetable oils, tested undiluted unless stated, three rabbits, 14 applications, graded microscopically. It predates Fulton 1989 and contradicts him in print on other materials. Cited twice here: for the absence of any rosehip row, and for its oils results, which are the reason we will not use a fatty-acid rule to infer a score. Olive oil, oleic-dominant, scored 0; safflower, one of the most linoleic oils there is, scored 1 to 2; sweet almond scored 3.
  3. Cosmetic Ingredient Review. "Safety Assessment of Rosa canina-derived Ingredients as Used in Cosmetics" — status line read: "Status: Final Report. Release Date: May 22, 2017". Published as Johnson W Jr et al., Int J Toxicol 41(1_suppl):5S-19S (2022) The industry safety dossier on twelve Rosa canina-derived ingredients. We name the document state deliberately: a tentative report for public comment on the same material exists at a near-identical URL, and citing a comment-stage draft as a final report is a mistake this site has made three times. This is the final. Two things it gives us. First, it contains zero occurrences of the string "comedo". Second, and more useful, it tells us that Rosa Canina Fruit Oil is NOT among its twelve ingredients — the oil was assessed in the CIR's plant-derived fatty acid oils review instead. Also the source of the composition figures on this page, for both the seed oil and, separately, the fruit.
  4. Burnett CL, Fiume MM, Bergfeld WF, et al. "Safety Assessment of Plant-Derived Fatty Acid Oils." Int J Toxicol 36(3_suppl):51S-129S (2017) The CIR's assessment of 244 plant-derived fatty acid oils, and the report that actually covers this ingredient: Rosa canina fruit oil and hydrogenated Rosa canina fruit oil both appear in its ingredient table. It states that, the oils being largely edible and of low systemic toxicity, "the safety focus of use of these oils as cosmetic ingredients is the potential for irritation and sensitization." We read the published assessment and found no comedogenicity data in it for this oil. It is a safety review, not a comedogenicity assay, and safety is not the same question.
  5. Oargă (Porumb) DP, Cornea-Cipcigan M, Nemeș SA, Cordea MI. "The Effectiveness of a Topical Rosehip Oil Treatment on Facial Skin Characteristics: A Pilot Study on Wrinkles, UV Spots Reduction, Erythema Mitigation, and Age-Related Signs." Cosmetics 12(3):125 (2025) The only study we found that put rosehip oil on human faces. An open-label, single-arm, uncontrolled pilot: 27 volunteers with normal skin, 23 women and 4 men, three drops of cold-pressed Rosa canina seed oil to the whole face daily for five weeks, every endpoint read off a VISIA imaging system. Declared unfunded, with no commercial relationship, by authors at an agricultural university who pressed the oil themselves. Cited here for its endpoints, and for what they are not: it measured wrinkles, texture, spots and a camera-derived "pore" score, and it counted no comedones — the word does not occur in the paper. It excluded anyone with a skin condition, so no acne-prone skin was enrolled. Its pore result is non-significant in the tables and contradicted in its own Discussion. It cannot be cited for or against comedogenicity, and the point of listing it is that it will be.
  6. Downing DT, Stewart ME, Wertz PW, Strauss JS. "Essential fatty acids and acne." J Am Acad Dermatol 14(2 Pt 1):221-225 (1986) The paper behind the "linoleic acid is the good one" argument, and it does not say what the argument needs it to say. It reports that people with acne have low linoleate in their skin-surface lipid, and proposes — as a hypothesis — that the dilution imposes essential fatty-acid deficiency on the follicular epithelium and induces hyperkeratosis. It is about the sebum the gland secretes, not about a high-linoleic oil applied on top of the skin. Cited as the real source of a mechanism that is routinely, and wrongly, presented as a measurement of oils like this one.
  7. Starzyk T, Aust N, Schur N, Miller R. "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals — a review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews 6:78-83 (December 2025) A peer-reviewed clinical review of the field from 1972 to 2025, whose conclusion we take seriously: no standardised comedogenicity test exists, and "non-comedogenic" is an unregulated claim. Listed here with an explicit gap. Its Table I prints rabbit-ear scores for a list of materials, and we could not retrieve that table — the publisher blocks the full text from us on this run — so we do not know whether it carries a rosehip row. On the one row from it we have previously checked against its own cited source, the number was not in the source.
  8. CosDNA ingredient database The only source our own ratings file lists for this ingredient, which is why it is disclosed here rather than quietly dropped. CosDNA publishes per-ingredient "acne" scores with no disclosed method, provenance or citation, and it is an aggregator rather than a laboratory. It is not independent corroboration of anything, and on an ingredient with no assay behind it, it cannot be republishing a measurement, because there is no measurement to republish.

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. What the evidence says about oils as a family ›

Last reviewed 2026-07-13 · How we decide

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