Squalane

Squalane is rated Clear on a one-letter distinction. Squalene, its unsaturated cousin, produces peroxides that are demonstrably comedogenic in rabbits and are enriched in human comedones. Squalane has had those double bonds hydrogenated away, and the one assay that graded it scored it 1 out of 5 — "not considered significant" by that paper's own key.

What it is

A saturated branched hydrocarbon, C30H62 — squalene with all six of its double bonds hydrogenated away. It was historically made from shark liver oil and is now more often made from the unsaponifiable fraction of olive oil or from fermented sugarcane. It is also a natural constituent of human sebum in its own right, in amounts up to about 2.6%, according to the Cosmetic Ingredient Review's safety assessment. Formulators reach for it because it is an emollient that behaves unlike most oils: light, fast-spreading, dry-feeling, and — the point of hydrogenating it in the first place — oxidatively stable, so it does not go rancid in the bottle. The CIR's 2019 use data records it in 2,785 formulations at concentrations up to 96.8%, meaning it is used both as a minor emollient and as essentially the entire product.

Why we rate it Clear

We rate it Clear at Moderate confidence, and the whole page is one letter. Squalene — with an e — is unsaturated, is a major component of human sebum, and oxidises readily. Its oxidation products are the ones with a case against them. Motoyoshi, working in rabbit ear skin in 1983, tested six substances including squalene and squalane, and found squalene itself "scarcely comedogenic" while squalene peroxides were highly comedogenic, with the size of the comedones tracking the lipid peroxide level. Chiba and colleagues isolated the specific molecule in 2000 — squalene monohydroperoxide, the first thing squalene becomes under UVA — and applied it to the ears of three to four rabbits, three times a week for two weeks. It produced comedones, and the reaction was stronger than that of known comedogenic cosmetic ingredients, while unoxidised squalene and reduced squalene-hydroxide did much less. In humans, Saint-Léger and colleagues in 1986 analysed lipids taken from open and closed comedones in acne patients and found them enriched in polar lipids derived mainly from squalene oxidation. Squalane is what squalene becomes when every double bond is saturated. Now the careful version of the sentence we got wrong. We wrote that squalane "has nothing left to peroxidise" and "cannot peroxidise." That is chemically false as an absolute. Hydrogenation removes the six carbon-carbon double bonds, which is what makes squalene oxidise so readily, so squalane cannot follow that pathway and is far more stable — that is precisely why it is hydrogenated in the first place, and why it does not go rancid in the bottle. But saturated hydrocarbons can still undergo radical autoxidation under forcing conditions, and squalane has been oxidised experimentally to alcohols, aldehydes, ketones and acids in the lubricant literature, at temperatures nothing like a human face. "Far more resistant" is true. "Incapable" is not, and we should not have to be caught to say so. So the argument for the rating is mechanistic, not clinical: we are inferring safety from the absence of the chemistry that makes the related molecule dangerous, plus one rabbit score in the insignificant band. We are not inferring it from a study showing squalane is safe on a face, because no such study exists.

What the evidence doesn’t tell you

There is a direct test of squalane that we have not been able to read, and it is the most important gap on this page. Motoyoshi's 1983 rabbit-ear study — the one whose squalene finding we lean on — did not test squalene alone. It tested six substances, and SQUALANE WAS ONE OF THEM. The published abstract reports the results for squalene and oleic acid and does not give squalane's individual outcome, and the full text is paywalled. So an experiment that applied this exact material to skin and counted comedones exists, and we do not know what it found. We previously wrote that squalane "has never been shown to clog anything." We cannot say that. What we can say is that no positive squalane result appears in anything we have been able to read. Those are different sentences, and the difference is the whole discipline of this site. Beyond that: we could not find a single published human comedogenicity trial of squalane. Not one. The comedogenicity section of the CIR's own safety assessment of squalane and squalene — the industry's dossier, reaffirmed as recently as 2019 — contains exactly one study, and it is Chiba's work on squalene monohydroperoxide. There is no comedogenicity data on squalane in it at all. So the rating rests on a mechanism, one rabbit score, and a gap — a weaker foundation than it sounds when stated confidently on a product page. A correction we owe you, because we told you the opposite. An earlier version of this page said we "could not obtain a legible copy" of Fulton's table and had "not verified" the score of 1 against his own page. We had. Fulton's Table I prints SQUALANE — 1, in the oils section, and the transcription of all 220 rows has been sitting in this project's own repository the entire time. The page was telling you a primary result was unverified while the verification sat one file away. That is not modesty; it is a different way of being unreliable, and it is the fourth time a page of ours has contradicted a document in its own repo. So: the score is 1, on Fulton's 0–5 scale, and it means less than it looks in both directions. His own key says a grade of 0 to 1 "is not considered significant." And the row sits under his heading "VI. Oils*", where the asterisk is defined once and means "results depend on source of raw material" — so even that 1 is a statement about one drum of squalane in 1989, not about the molecule. Both Draelos and DiNardo in 2006 and the 2025 JAAD Reviews survey of the field concluded that rabbit-ear results do not transfer reliably to human skin and that no standardised comedogenicity test exists. That cuts in both directions — it undermines a bad score and it undermines a good one equally. Two more gaps. Purity is a manufacturing question that no comedogenicity study addresses: the CIR notes that the shark-liver route yields squalane of at least 96% purity, with the remainder neutral fat and pristane, and nothing in the literature tests whether one supplier's squalane behaves like another's. And on the question readers actually ask — whether squalane feeds Malassezia and causes fungal acne — no study has tested it. The available reasoning is genomic: Malassezia globosa lacks a fatty acid synthase gene and must scavenge fatty acids from its host, and squalane is a pure hydrocarbon containing none. That is an inference from a fungal genome, not a result from skin, and it should be read as one. Individual breakouts attributed to squalane are reported by users on ingredient databases; the literature neither explains them nor excludes them.

Where you’ll see it

Facial oils, serums, moisturisers, eye creams, cleansing oils and balms, and a great deal of colour cosmetics — foundation, lipstick, mascara — where suppliers sell it on spreadability and a dry, non-greasy finish. It appears on a label simply as Squalane, sometimes with its origin named (olive, sugarcane). Its position on an ingredient list tells you less than usual, because it is used across the entire range: the CIR's 2019 data records a maximum use concentration of 96.8%, which is to say it is also sold neat, as the product. The near-identical word Squalene is now rare on labels — 527 formulations against squalane's 2,785 in the same data, with its maximum reported concentration having fallen from 10% in 2001 to 1.2% in 2018 — but the two are not interchangeable, and the difference is the entire subject of this page.

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. Motoyoshi K. "Enhanced comedo formation in rabbit ear skin by squalene and oleic acid peroxides." Br J Dermatol 109:191–198 (1983) Primary source, and the closest thing to a direct test of squalane that exists. A rabbit-ear assay of six substances — squalene, oleic acid, tetradecane, isopropyl myristate, squalane and liquid paraffin — irradiated and not. Squalene itself was scarcely comedogenic; squalene peroxides were highly comedogenic, and comedone size correlated with lipid peroxide level. The published abstract reports the results for squalene and oleic acid; we have not read the full text and do not claim to know squalane's individual score from it.
2. Chiba K, Yoshizawa K, Makino I, Kawakami K, Onoue M. "Comedogenicity of squalene monohydroperoxide in the skin after topical application." J Toxicol Sci 25(2):77–83 (2000) Primary source. Isolated squalene monohydroperoxide by HPLC and applied it to the ears of three to four rabbits, three times weekly for two weeks. Comedones formed in a dose- and irradiation-dependent way, more strongly than with known comedogenic cosmetic ingredients, while squalene itself and reduced squalene-hydroxide were much less active. This is the study that pins comedogenicity on the peroxide rather than on squalene — and, by extension, is the strongest single reason squalane is not in the same conversation.
3. Saint-Léger D, Bagué A, Lefebvre E, Cohen E, Chivot M. "A possible role for squalene in the pathogenesis of acne. II. In vivo study of squalene oxides in skin surface and intra-comedonal lipids of acne patients." Br J Dermatol 114(5):543–552 (1986) Human data, and the reason the squalene-peroxide story is not purely an animal finding. Lipids from open and closed comedones in acne patients were enriched in polar lipids derived mainly from squalene oxidation, compared with controls. Observational and correlational — it shows the oxidation products are present where the comedones are, not that they caused them.
4. Ottaviani M, Alestas T, Flori E, Mastrofrancesco A, Zouboulis CC, Picardo M. "Peroxidated squalene induces the production of inflammatory mediators in HaCaT keratinocytes." J Invest Dermatol 126(11):2430–2437 (2006) Laboratory work on cultured keratinocytes, not skin. Peroxidated squalene activated NF-κB and raised IL-6. Cited to show that the case against squalene peroxides is inflammatory as well as comedogenic — and to mark the boundary, since none of it applies to a molecule that cannot peroxidise.
5. Cosmetic Ingredient Review. "Safety Assessment of Squalane and Squalene as Used in Cosmetics" (original report 1982; re-review documents through 2019) The cosmetics industry's own safety dossier, and the source of the composition and use figures on this page. Its significance here is what it does not contain — the entire comedogenicity section is about squalene monohydroperoxide, citing Chiba. There is no comedogenicity study of squalane in it. An industry review with every incentive to state that squalane is non-comedogenic has no data with which to do so.
6. Fulton JE. "Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products." J Soc Cosmet Chem 40:321–333 (1989) The rabbit-ear assay that produced the 0–5 scale nearly every comedogenic list still uses, including ours. Method — ingredient diluted to 10% in propylene glycol, applied to the inner ear of three New Zealand albino rabbits, 1 ml daily, five days a week for two weeks, follicles scored for keratosis. His Table I prints SQUALANE — 1, and we have read that row: an earlier version of this page said the table was not legible enough to read, which was simply wrong, and our own verbatim transcription of all 220 rows was in the repository at the time. Two things qualify the 1. Fulton's own key says a grade of 0 to 1 "is not considered significant." And the row sits under his heading "VI. Oils*", whose asterisk he defines once — "results depend on source of raw material" — so the number describes a drum of squalane, not the molecule.
7. Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept." J Am Acad Dermatol 54:507–512 (2006) Peer-reviewed argument that rabbit-ear results do not reliably predict comedogenicity in human skin, and that testing an isolated ingredient says little about a finished formula. Cited here against our own rating as much as for it — the same objection that lets an ingredient off a bad score also denies a good one any real authority.
8. "Comedogenicity in cosmeceuticals: A review of clinical relevance, regulatory gaps, and future directions." JAAD Reviews (2025) Recent peer-reviewed review of the whole field. Finds that 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.
9. Xu J, Saunders CW, Hu P, et al. "Dandruff-associated Malassezia genomes reveal convergent and divergent virulence traits." Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(47):18730–18735 (2007) Genome paper, cited for one fact only — Malassezia globosa lacks a fatty acid synthase gene and therefore depends on host-derived fatty acids. It is the basis of the common claim that squalane is safe in Malassezia folliculitis. It is a fungal genome, not a skin study, and the step from it to a human face is an inference we are flagging rather than making.
10. CosDNA ingredient entry for Squalane Where most readers will have met the number. Lists squalane with an acne (comedogenic) rating of 1 and a safety rating of 1, with no stated method and no per-ingredient citation. It is a republisher of the legacy assay scores, not an independent measurement, and its user comments — which include people reporting breakouts from squalane — are anecdote, not data. Listed because naming it as a republisher is more useful than citing it as corroboration.
11. Sophim, "Squalane" (manufacturer product page) A major olive-squalane manufacturer, and a clean example of how the claim propagates. Its technical page states plainly that squalane "is non-comedogenic" and cites nothing for it. The chemistry it describes — hydrogenation of squalene's unsaturated chain to a stable saturated one — is correct and is the substance of our rating. The comedogenicity claim resting on top of it is an assertion by an interested party, and it is the assertion the rest of the internet repeats.

Others in the same family

Hydrocarbons 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 hydrocarbons as a family ›

• Hydrogenated Polyisobutene Clear Low
• Mineral Oil Clear Moderate
• Petrolatum Clear High

Last reviewed 2026-07-13 · How we decide

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