About the project.

Not unreadable because the words are hard, though they are. Unreadable because the type is six points high, printed on a curve, in grey on silver, and because knowing that "butyrospermum parkii butter" is shea butter does not tell you whether the formula around it suits your skin.

There are apps that solve half of this. They read the list, then rank each ingredient on a scale from clean to toxic. That framing is mostly marketing. It treats a preservative doing its job as a hazard, and it gives the same answer to everyone, which is the one thing skin does not do.

What we built instead

SkinPassport asks you seven questions once, then scores every formula against those answers. The same product can be an excellent match for one person and a poor one for the next, and the app will say so, with the arithmetic visible: where the score started and every plus and minus your profile applied.

Underneath it sits the part that took longest. 142 ingredient notes, written by hand, describing what a thing does and who it tends to bother. Under those, the European Commission's CosIng vocabulary, 33,570 names, which is how the app tells a real ingredient from a misread one and corrects the near misses instead of scoring them wrong.

The rule we kept

Never fake certainty. It is the hardest rule to hold, because a confident number is always more satisfying than an honest one, and it is the rule that decided most of what the app does.

So the app shows you which words it read and which it could not. When too little of a formula comes back familiar, it returns "Read, not scored" instead of a number nobody should trust. When the evidence on an ingredient is genuinely thin, the note says so. When something is not one of the 142, it says that too.

The same rule shaped what leaves your phone. Most labels are read by the text recognition already on the device, and nothing travels on that path. When a photograph does have to travel, it is read and then it is gone. There is no advertising, nothing is sold, and deleting your account deletes it.

Where it is now

The app is built and in the last stretch before the App Store, iOS first and Android behind it. The catalog holds 50 curated products and grows every week, and the fastest way to grow it istelling us what is missing.

What it will never be is a substitute for a dermatologist. It reads ingredient lists and scores them against your profile; it does not diagnose skin conditions and it does not treat them. Anything you are actually managing belongs with a dermatologist, not an app.