Schaebens face masks

The short read

• Phenoxyethanol, allantoin, hydroxyacetophenone, citric acid and sodium hydroxide are each printed here at well above their catalogue shares. Hydroxylated lecithin turns up on this shelf and almost nowhere else.

• Schaebens and Balea are alone in the catalogue in spanning as many formats as they do, and they span the same ones. Every other brand reaches fewer.

• Only a minority of these masks leave fragrance off the list and most print parfum, but rather fewer break an allergen out by name - so most of the fragrance on this shelf is declared as the single word.

• Most of the shelf carries no essential oil and most is free of a drying alcohol. A small number are recorded vegan, below the catalogue's share.

• Almost every per-use figure here is counted off a pack rather than estimated, so the price tile above is firmer than on a shelf of pots.

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.

• Sodium Citrate6 of 21 here·22 of 219 overall
• Trehalose7 of 21 here·29 of 219 overall
• Sodium Hydroxide9 of 21 here·39 of 219 overall
• Phenoxyethanol13 of 21 here·71 of 219 overall
• Niacinamide8 of 21 here·46 of 219 overall
• Allantoin14 of 21 here·84 of 219 overall
• Pentylene Glycol8 of 21 here·48 of 219 overall
• Hydroxyacetophenone11 of 21 here·67 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 unrecorded for 16 of the 21 masks here, so that row counts only the packs where we found it stated - unrecorded is not the same as not vegan. How far into a list we can read is its own reading: the encyclopaedia has an entry for a median of 83% 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.

• Sheet9 of 21·43%
• Cream6 of 21·29%
• Hydrogel2 of 21·10%
• Peel-off2 of 21·10%
• Clay1 of 21·5%
• Wash-off1 of 21·5%

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

All 21 Schaebens masks

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

• 

  Aloe Vera Maske

  34ingredients

  !10 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.28 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske Feuchtigkeit Sofort-Effekt

  38ingredients

  !5 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.28 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske Kollagen Boost

  27ingredients

  !4 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.28 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske Panthenol

  22ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €0.28 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske Zink

  27ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €0.28 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske peel off Aktivkohle Strong

  20ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  ≈€0.45 per use

• 

  Gesichtscrememaske Gel to Milk

  21ingredients

  !10 ingredients we would look at twice

  ≈€0.60 per use

• 

  Totes Meer Schlamm Maske

  14ingredients

  !2 ingredients we would look at twice

  ≈€0.60 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske peel off Aktivkohle

  8ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.63 per use

• 

  Hyaluron Maske

  32ingredients

  !5 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.70 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Tonerde

  35ingredients

  !4 ingredients we would look at twice

  €0.85 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske AHA Peeling

  17ingredients

  !4 ingredients we would look at twice

  €1.45 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Hyaluron

  23ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €1.45 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Kollagen Boost

  27ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €1.45 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Reiswasser

  23ingredients

  €1.45 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Vitamin C

  19ingredients

  !1 ingredient we would look at twice

  €1.45 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Melon Love

  45ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  €1.55 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Summer Glow

  44ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  €1.55 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Jelly Ceramide

  29ingredients

  €1.75 per use

• 

  Gesichtsmaske Hyaluron Hydrogel

  19ingredients

  !3 ingredients we would look at twice

  €2.75 per use

• 

  Tuchmaske Kollagen Hydrogel

  27ingredients

  €2.75 per use