The thickeners, entry by entry

The short read

• Every entry is graded at the site's calmest level and the Regulation barely reaches the class at all. Gums, celluloses, carbomers and seaweed polysaccharides, on the large majority of the catalogue.

• These names sit late on a list, mostly below the point where descending order stops carrying information, which means they are present in small amounts. Texture is therefore not a question of how much a mask contains, but of which of these it chose.

• The class rewards attention for a reason that has nothing to do with safety. Whatever a reader makes of how a mask feels, this is the group responsible for it, and its position on the label says the decision was made with very little material.

All 22 thickener 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 thickener entries sit a median 55% of the way down a list, and 73% 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.