Medicube face masks

The short read

• The cheaper figures on this shelf are the estimated ones and the dearer are the counted ones, so the spread in the tile above is partly a difference in how the number was arrived at rather than in what the masks cost.

• Ascorbic acid, collagen extract, hydrolyzed collagen, adenosine and Polyglyceryl-10 laurate are each printed here at well above their catalogue shares.

• This is the only shelf with a page here holding an overnight mask, and - alone with Luvos-Heilerde - one holding no sheet mask at all. The format mix below is most of why the lists here are as long as they are.

• Not one mask here declares a fragrance allergen by name, though some do print parfum. Every mask is free of both an essential oil and a drying alcohol.

• The encyclopaedia reads less far into these lists than into the catalogue's as a whole, and only a minority of the shelf is clear of the pregnancy flag.

What these lists print that others do not

Not the most common ingredients - water is on nearly every list ever written and tells you nothing about who formulated the mask. These are the entries that appear far more often here than across the 219 masks as a whole, counted by encyclopaedia entry rather than by printed name. A shelf this size makes coincidences cheap, so nothing appears below that is on fewer than four of these lists.

• Adenosine4 of 5 here·28 of 219 overall
• Polyglyceryl-10 Laurate4 of 5 here·37 of 219 overall
• Ethylhexylglycerin5 of 5 here·103 of 219 overall
• Butylene Glycol5 of 5 here·108 of 219 overall
• 1,2-Hexanediol4 of 5 here·95 of 219 overall

Names without a link have no encyclopaedia entry yet, so we make no claim about them beyond the count.

The 10 side by side

A brand needs 5 masks to carry a page, which is the floor at which a shelf says something a filter could not, and 10 of the 91 brands in the catalogue reach it. The other 81 are still in the catalogue and out of this table: 69 of them hold one or two masks, and 51 hold exactly one, and a median over one product is not a median. This is the one family whose whole partition will not go in a table, so a superlative here scoped to all brands is one a reader has to take on trust - the five that are so scoped are listed in lib/brands.ts for a reviewer to re-check.

What these labels print

Seven readings of the ingredient list, each counted the same way across this shelf and across the whole catalogue, so the second column is the baseline the first is worth reading against. Every one of them is a statement about what is printed on a pack - not about what a mask does, and not a verdict on any of them. The pregnancy flag in particular is a reason to read a list rather than a warning: it marks a mask carrying something the encyclopaedia says to check, which is a different thing from a mask being unsafe.

Vegan status is recorded for none of the masks here, so that row is a gap in the dataset rather than a reading of these packs. How far into a list we can read is its own reading: the encyclopaedia has an entry for a median of 74% of each list here, against 82% across the catalogue. The rest is printed in names the site cannot yet decode, and an undecoded name is one we make no claim about either way - what we do not know.

Which formats these are

A format is the plainest thing about a mask that is not on its ingredient list - what you buy it in and how you use it - and it explains a good deal of what the readings above look like. A shelf of pots and tubes carries longer, oilier lists than a shelf of sachets, and its price per use is worked out rather than counted.

• Hydrogel3 of 5·60%
• Overnight2 of 5·40%

Formats without a link have too few masks in the catalogue to carry a page of their own.

All 5 Medicube masks

Cheapest use first. Every one is on sale in the EU and has a published ingredient list we could source and check.

• 

  Collagen Night Wrapping Mask

  24ingredients

  ≈€0.60 per use

• 

  Kojic Acid Turmeric Night Wrapping Mask

  22ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  ≈€1.20 per use

• 

  Collagen Lifting Mask

  39ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €3.99 per use

• 

  PDRN Pink Collagen Gel Mask

  43ingredients

  !2 ingredients we would look at twice

  €4.41 per use

• 

  Kojic Acid Turmeric Brightening Gel Mask

  35ingredients

  !4 ingredients we would look at twice

  €4.73 per use