Reading labels when your skin reacts to everything

“For sensitive skin” is not a regulated claim. Anyone can print it on anything. It usually means the formulator left out fragrance and one or two of the usual suspects, which is a reasonable guess at what bothers you, but it remains a guess.

The more useful move is to work out what your skin actually reacts to, because “sensitive skin” covers at least three different situations that need different things.

Three different problems wearing the same name

Irritation. A dose-dependent response that most people would get if you used enough of the ingredient for long enough. Your threshold is just lower. Acids, high-strength actives and surfactants live here. The fix is usually less, or less often, rather than never.

Allergy. An immune response to a specific molecule. It does not care about dose in the same way, it tends to get worse with repeated exposure, and it is worth identifying properly, ideally with patch testing. Fragrance components and some preservatives are common culprits.

A compromised barrier. Not a reaction to any ingredient at all. Skin that has been over-exfoliated or over-treated reacts to things it used to tolerate. The tell is that the list of things bothering you keeps growing.

The third one is the most common and the most misdiagnosed, and it is the one where an ingredient app can actively mislead you. If you scan five products and Pura flags something in four of them, the honest reading is often not that those ingredients are the problem.

What to suspect first

Fragrance is the reasonable first suspicion. On an EU label it appears as “parfum” with specific allergens named separately when they are above a threshold, so a long tail of names ending in -ol and -al at the end of a list is often the fragrance breaking down into its declared parts.

Preservatives come second, and here it is worth being fair to them. Something has to stop a water-containing product growing bacteria, and the alternative to a preservative is usually a worse preservative or a spoiled product. Potassium sorbate is one of the gentler options and is a common substitution for people who react to others.

Actives come third. Salicylic acid and Retinol are both genuinely irritating at the wrong concentration or frequency, and both are frequently used at the wrong concentration and frequency. Neither is a reason to panic, and both are usually a reason to use less.

The one label habit worth building

Check where an ingredient sits in the list before you worry about it. Order is by quantity down to one percent, so the position tells you roughly how much is in there. The guide to reading a label covers what that ordering does and does not tell you.