The humectants, entry by entry

The short read

• No entry in this class is reached by any annex of the Regulation - not a cap, not a labelling duty, not a ban. The EU status column below reads the same on every row, which is not true of most classes on this site.

• Nearly every entry is graded at the site's calmest level. Where one is not, the reason tends to be that the answer depends on the reader rather than on anything the Regulation has to say - which is why the grade and the EU status sit in separate columns below rather than on one scale.

• These names sit high on a label, and they are names most readers half-recognise already: glycerin, the glycols, the hyaluronates, sugars and sugar alcohols, panthenol, betaine. Because an ingredient list runs in descending order of weight, a position that high is a statement about how much of the pack they are.

All 42 humectant entries

Widest reach first. The grade and the EU status are separate columns because they are separate questions: a capped Annex V preservative can be the calmest thing on a label, and an unrestricted plant extract can be the entry most worth reading. Every one of these entries has its own page, with the sources behind it.

Where this class sits on a pack

An ingredient list is not in a random order. Article 19(1)(g) of Regulation (EC) 1223/2009 requires it to run “in descending order of weight of the ingredients at the time they are added”, and then allows everything under 1% to be listed “in any order” after the rest. So the top of a list is a statement about quantity and the bottom of it is not - which is the ≈1% line the Panel draws on every product page.

Counted across every appearance of this class in the catalogue, and measured as a fraction of each list’s own length so a 4-entry pack and an 81-entry pack count equally, the humectant entries sit a median 33% of the way down a list, and 34% of those appearances fall below the ≈1% line. Where that share is high, position has stopped telling a reader anything about how much is in the pack.

Every class in the encyclopaedia, side by side

The encyclopaedia sorts its entries into 24 classes and 10 have a page: a class needs 15 entries to carry one, below which a landing page is a re-headed filter view. “Other” is excluded whatever its size, because a bucket cannot be a landing page. Every figure here is counted across all 24, so any comparison in the copy above is scoped against a set you can see rather than against the ones that happened to ship.

An entry has exactly one class, so the entries column sums to 329. The masks column does not sum to 219 and is not meant to - a single list prints entries from a great many classes at once.