SkinCarisma Review: Ingredient Analysis and Routine Logging

SkinCarisma is a free ingredient-analysis website with a database of 121,000+ products and 16,000+ ingredients. Paste an ingredient list or search a product and you get a 0 to 100 safety score, 0 to 5 comedogenic ratings, a fungal-acne (Malassezia) check and a free routine builder and skin journal. Its safety score leans on EWG hazard data, and there's no app yet.

Below we look at each tool in turn: the analyzer and how its score is calculated, the fungal-acne flags, the routine and journal features, ads and money, and how fresh the database is. We also compare it with CosDNA. Everything here comes from SkinCarisma's own pages as of October 2026; we didn't test the accuracy of its ratings.

Is there a better alternative to SkinCarisma?

For checks tied to your own skin type, look at Pori, the iPhone app we make. Its Pro ingredient scanner reads a barcode or a photo of the label and flags each ingredient beneficial, use with caution or avoid for your skin type, using fixed rules over a curated list of about 250 INCI ingredients. The same app gives you a 0 to 100 skin score from a selfie, a morning and evening routine and a diary for sleep, water, stress and diet, so you can see whether a product change shows up in your skin. Pro costs $9.99 a week with a 3-day trial for eligible Apple IDs, or $49.99 a year (US, as of October 2026).

SkinCarisma does several things Pori doesn't. Its ingredient dictionary is far broader than Pori's curated list, the analyzer is free, it runs in any browser on any phone or computer, and it has a dedicated fungal-acne checker. If you want an iPhone app that knows your skin, start with Pori; if you want a free, deep lookup tool, SkinCarisma is a strong choice. For more options, see our INCIDecoder alternatives.

What does SkinCarisma's ingredient analyzer show?

The ingredient analyzer, linked from the homepage, takes a pasted INCI list, or a product from the database, and breaks it down ingredient by ingredient, sorted into low, moderate and high hazard groups with an overall score. The methodology page says the data comes from EWG, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) panel, the EU's CosIng register and published literature, plus community-submitted lists, pH data and reviews, which it says are manually reviewed and labeled as community data. "We don't invent ratings," it says.

The product safety score starts at 100 and subtracts points for the share of moderate- and high-hazard ingredients:

That formula, from the methodology page (last reviewed June 2026), counts ingredients, not amounts. SkinCarisma says so itself: an ingredient list doesn't tell you how much of each ingredient is in the product, and the score can't account for buffering or how your skin responds. It also treats EWG as "a reference point, not a ruling," and its own resources page describes EWG Skin Deep as "often stricter than real-world use".

How does SkinCarisma's comedogenic rating work?

The pore-clogging checker matches each ingredient to published comedogenic ratings from 0 (does not clog) to 5 (clogs severely), grouping 2 as mild, 3 as moderate and 4 to 5 as high. Ingredients without a rating aren't flagged. Its cited sources are Kligman and Mills's 1972 "Acne cosmetica" paper, James Fulton's 1989 rabbit-ear survey and a 2006 re-evaluation by Draelos and DiNardo.

SkinCarisma is upfront about the limits, calling the ratings "a useful warning, not a verdict." That matches the research. Fulton's test applied each ingredient at 10% in propylene glycol to rabbit ears daily for two weeks, and he noted the model's "extreme sensitivity." The 2006 study found that finished products using comedogenic ingredients are not necessarily comedogenic. Our CosDNA review explains how to read these numbers in more detail.

How good are SkinCarisma's fungal-acne flags?

They're a cautious, well-explained screen, and the site labels them experimental. The fungal-acne checker is free, needs no sign-up and says nothing you paste is stored. It's built on the idea that Malassezia yeast can't make its own fatty acids, so it flags ingredients that can feed it:

• Flagged as triggers: esters of fatty acids such as isopropyl myristate and glyceryl stearate, polysorbates, most plant oils and butters, triglycerides, free fatty acids, lanolin, lecithin and beeswax.
• Flagged as possible: fatty alcohols such as cetyl and cetearyl alcohol, and squalene, with a suggestion to avoid them during a flare.
• Not flagged: squalane ("a hydrocarbon, not a fat"), MCT oil, mineral oil, petrolatum, silicones, glycerin, essential oils and ceteareth-20.

The page is candid that much of the evidence comes from yeast grown in the lab on single fatty acids, so the checker "leans cautious," and that a "fungal-acne safe" result only means no known yeast food was found. The FAQ calls the label experimental and says it isn't a guaranteed predictor.

Fungal flags and comedogenic ratings measure different things. Polysorbate 80, for example, scored 0 for comedogenicity in Fulton's rabbit-ear table, yet it's on SkinCarisma's fungal trigger list. A product can pass one check and fail the other.

Before you rebuild a routine around these flags, make sure the bumps are fungal. DermNet describes Malassezia folliculitis as small, uniform, itchy papules and pustules, mostly on the upper back and chest, without the blackheads and whiteheads of acne, and notes that a skin scraping can confirm it. Treatment is antifungal, which a dermatologist can prescribe. Our guide to fungal acne vs regular acne covers the signs.

Can you log your routine on SkinCarisma?

Yes, with a free account. The routine builder lets you set up AM and PM routines step by step with the products you actually use and share them with the SkinCarisma community. The skin journal is a daily check-in where you "log how your skin feels each day in a few taps," private to your account, meant to show the trend over weeks. An account also lets you save products to lists, mark ingredients as good or bad for you and write reviews, per the FAQ.

What we didn't find: the routine builder page doesn't mention warnings for products that clash, and the journal page doesn't mention photos. If you want photo progress tracking, see our guide on how to track acne progress.

Does SkinCarisma have ads or an app?

Its FAQ lists an ad-free experience as a benefit of signing up, so expect ads if you browse without an account. The site also earns affiliate commission when you buy through its retailer links, which its About page calls a "tiny kickback," and the methodology page says affiliate links never change an analysis. The homepage adds that no brand can buy a placement or a rating.

There's no app. The FAQ says, "Whilst we currently don't have an app, we can assure you that an app will be coming out in the future!" On a phone you can use the barcode scanner in your browser instead. It reads the barcode on your device, looks it up in SkinCarisma's catalog or Open Beauty Facts, and if there's no match, asks for a photo of the front of the pack, which it sends to a server for text reading and says it doesn't store.

How current is SkinCarisma's database?

It looks active. As of October 2026 the homepage showed 121,571 products, 16,911 ingredients explained and 26,060 lists analyzed in the previous 30 days, and the methodology page was last reviewed in June 2026. The product database is community powered: members add products and the team manually approves them, and the FAQ admits that errors sometimes slip through. Brands reformulate, so check any listing against the ingredient list on your box before you rely on it.

SkinCarisma vs CosDNA: which should you use?

Use SkinCarisma if you want fungal-acne flags, a product-level score and a routine log; use CosDNA if you only want acne and irritant numbers per ingredient at a glance. Both read a product's INCI list. SkinCarisma's own comparison page, which is a competitor's view, describes CosDNA as listing each ingredient's function with acne and irritant ratings.

CosDNA's site blocked our automated checks in October 2026, so the CosDNA column is limited to what we could confirm. SkinCarisma also lets you paste a CosDNA product link to analyze the same list, per its comparison page.

The verdict

SkinCarisma is one of the more complete free ingredient sites: a large, active database, a transparent scoring formula, comedogenic ratings with honest caveats and a thoughtful fungal-acne checker. Its weak spots are the EWG-based safety score, which counts flagged ingredients without knowing amounts, ads for visitors without an account and the lack of an app. Use it to research a product, sign up if you want the routine log without ads, and let your skin's response over a few weeks have the final say.