Juventude believes in ingredient transparency. To help our customers understand what is in our products, we have created a scorecard which shows how six independent groups of scientists and skin care experts have rated each ingredient.
This way, you don't have to take our word for it but can see how those in the know have rated each ingredient. Also, let’s be honest, we don’t have nearly as much money nor scientists as these institutions.
So how does it work?
First, we looked at the US Food and Drug Administrations list of Prohibited & Restricted Ingredients in Cosmetics. You can find out more about it here, though it is not much to look at as the USFDA only prohibits 11 ingredients in cosmetics. That doesn’t seem like much, now does it?
Second, we thought, ‘Gee, I wonder what Europe does?’ so we looked up it. In 2009 (yeah, like almost 2 decades ago) the European Commission passed Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. This very boring named regulation has the stated scope and objective of:
“This Regulation establishes rules to be complied with by any cosmetic product made available on the market, in order to ensure the functioning of the internal market and a high level of protection of human health.”
Seem’s like a good thing. So, Europe established CosIng which is a public database indicating which ingredients are prohibited and linking to the official opinion provide by the European Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS). As of Nov. 1 2025 there were 2537 banned substances, 789 restricted substances, 309 allowed colorants, 173 allowed preservatives, and 47 allowed UV filters on the list. Basically, this means the bar for safety is sooooooo much higher in Europe than is the US.
Third, we came across the European’s list for Known Endocrine Disruptors. Basically, each European country can identify ingredients they consider to be Substances of Very High Concern. Then, the European Commission has a team of scientists who go investigate the ingredient and determine if it is or is not actually a health risk and an endocrine disruptor. We figured, since our founder is an estrogen-driven breast cancer survivor and we don’t like cancer, or infertility, or early puberty, we should avoid these too.
Fourth, we thought ‘Wonder what those hippies out in California think…’ so we checked in with California’s Proposition 65. You know, the one that makes products put labels like ‘This has ingredients known in the state of California to cause cancer.’ Yeah, that one. Instead of taking the, let’s just put a warning on it approach, we thought we’d just find ingredients not on their list.
Fifth, we thought, well what is the industry point of view on this one, is it GRAS “Generally Recognized as Safe”? Oh, it’s complicated. So, the US FDA does not really have much jurisdiction over cosmetics. Though, there is a law out there that could change that in the future. Instead, there’s more of a public-private partnership in place where the cosmetic industry is supposed to self-regulated based on the opinions of the Cosmetic Ingredient Review and their Expert Panel for Cosmetic Ingredient Safety. They have dermatologists, and toxicologists, and all sorts of scientists do lots of studies and testing to determine if there is sufficient data to call a substance safe for use in cosmetics. They’ve been around since 1976 and have reviewed a lot of ingredients. Now, some people have concerns that this group is funded by cosmetic companies and doesn’t have any legal ability to force compliance. So, we figured we’d avoid ingredients they don’t consider safe but wouldn’t rely only on their opinion. One observation in reading their (sometimes 100+ pages) opinions on lots and lots of ingredients, is that they don’t often call an ingredient unsafe, but frequently say there is insufficient data to support a safe determination. Semantics.
Sixth, we figured we’d check in with some industry watch dogs too. Our favorite is the Environmental Working Group’s SkinDeep Database. They have reviewed over 136,013 ingredients and ranked them from 1 (best) to 10 (worst). So we wanted to check to see what they think too. Now, one not here. EWG is giving a ranking on the ingredient for use as a liquid and spray. Many of their rankings are ranges like 1 to 4, more often than not, an ingredient is ranked lower if it is a liquid and thus not likely to be inhaled than a spray. Chemicals are very specialized things, and some are totally fine for the skin, but not so great for the lungs. Just a note for when you see ranges.
Okay, so there you go. To recap, we made a scorecard that shows you how each ingredient performed in safety assessments done by six other groups. We figured we’d never have enough time, money or scientists to do a better job than these groups did. So, instead of giving it our own rating, we are just showing you theirs.