How We Decide

Brand grading

We assign every brand we cover a single letter grade from A to F. The grade reflects the entire product range we have surveyed for that brand, not a single SKU. Grades are editorial and are based on publicly verifiable signals, not insider information.

The signals we weigh

A grade is not a single number. It is a composite of the following:

• Ingredient transparency. Whether the brand fully discloses fragrance components, surfactant blends, and preservative systems rather than hiding them behind generic “parfum” or “proprietary blend” labels.
• Third-party certifications. Including GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), GOLS (Global Organic Latex Standard), MADE SAFE, OEKO-TEX Standard 100, GREENGUARD Gold, Clean at Sephora, EWG Verified, Fair Trade, NSF/ANSI 42, 53, 58, 401, P473, and WQA Gold Seal where category-relevant. We weight independent third-party schemes more heavily than self-attested marketing claims.
• Reformulation history. Whether a brand has quietly added or removed flagged ingredients without disclosure. Quiet reformulation in either direction is informative about how the brand treats its customers.
• Parent-company practices. A clean sub-brand owned by a conglomerate that produces the opposite product elsewhere is rated against the parent record where the parent operates the supply chain.
• Third-party testing. Whether the brand publishes independent lab reports for heavy metals, microbial contamination, plasticiser leaching, or filtration performance, and whether the testing methodology is disclosed.
• Regulatory action history. FDA warning letters, Prop 65 notices, ECHA enforcement actions, ACCC undertakings, consumer-protection settlements, and product recalls in the last ten years.

Ingredient severity

Every ingredient on this site carries a severity rating of high, medium, or low. The rating reflects the strength of evidence for harm at exposures plausible from normal product use. It is not a measure of how scary the ingredient sounds.

Concern tags, in plain English

Each ingredient also carries one or more concern tags. The tags describe the kind of harm the underlying evidence concerns; severity (above) describes the strength of that evidence.

Water quality

Our water lookup tool resolves a postcode, ZIP, or named city to a utility, then surfaces that utility's most recent published water-quality data. The data model is documented in the codebase: a Utility is the primary record, and Locations are thin lookups that map user input to a Utility.

Data sources

How we map locations to utilities

User input is normalised (lower-cased, hyphens and spaces removed) and matched against a list of postcode and ZIP prefixes attached to each utility, plus named-city aliases for the most common queries. Where multiple utilities serve overlapping prefixes, we resolve to the dominant utility and surface a note when the supply boundary is ambiguous.

How contaminant statuses are assigned

Articles and citations

We cite primary sources where they exist: peer-reviewed papers, regulatory documents, and government reports. We do not cite blog posts, press releases, or brand-funded studies as primary evidence. Where a secondary source is unavoidable (a respected science journalist summarising a paywalled report, for example) we link to it and mark it as secondary.

When a study shows something modest, we say it modestly. When evidence is preliminary, we label it preliminary. When a finding has only been shown in a single study without independent replication, we say so in the same sentence as the finding, not in a footnote.

We hold a separate consolidated sources page listing the major studies and regulatory documents cited across the site, grouped by topic.

Conflicts of interest

Untoxed Health earns revenue from affiliate commissions on product links. The programmes we currently use:

Our policy: products are recommended on merit first. Affiliate availability never changes a grade, never changes recommendation order, and never causes us to add a product we would not otherwise recommend. If a product is the right answer to a question and no affiliate programme exists, we link to the retailer directly with no commission.

We do not accept payment for brand placement, favourable grades, or sponsored content. We do not run native advertising. We do not exchange coverage for product samples that we keep, and any sample we receive is disclosed inline with any review that mentions it.

Editorial independence is structural. Brand and PR outreach is routed to a separate inbox that the editorial team does not monitor. The editorial team reviews on a fixed schedule (see Update cadence below), not on demand from outside parties. A brand cannot accelerate, delay, or influence its own review.

How to flag an error

If you find a factual error, a broken citation, or an outdated grade, email hello@untoxed.health with a link to the page and, where possible, a primary source for the correction.

We aim to publish corrections within five business days of confirming the error. Substantive corrections (those that change a grade, a severity rating, or a contaminant status) are noted at the bottom of the affected page with the date of correction. Typo fixes are made silently.

Update cadence

• Brands are re-reviewed on a quarterly rolling cycle, with priority given to brands that have announced a reformulation, lost a certification, or been the subject of a regulatory action since the last review.
• Water utility data is reviewed annually, timed to the publication window for Consumer Confidence Reports (US) and water-company annual reports (UK and EU). Utilities under active enforcement action are flagged as soon as the action is published.
• Articles and guides are reviewed when the cited research is updated, when a new systematic review or regulatory document supersedes a primary citation, or annually at minimum.
• Ingredient pages are reviewed when an IARC monograph, ECHA opinion, US NTP report, or peer-reviewed systematic review changes the underlying evidence base.