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, Fair Trade, NSF/ANSI 42, 53, 55, 58, 401, and WQA Gold Seal where category-relevant. Certification applies only to the exact product and claims in the certifier listing. Retail programs and independent tests are not treated as certification.
• 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, plasticizer 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 normalized (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

For material chemical, ingredient, and guide claims, our practice is to cite peer-reviewed primary research or authoritative regulator guidance. Brand grades are editorial assessments based on published ingredient lists, current certification listings, regulatory records, and product information available on the stated review date. Citation coverage is not sentence by sentence, and a cited association is not presented as proof of causation.

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 do not treat blog posts, press releases, or manufacturer summaries as primary health evidence. Manufacturer material can support a product-specific fact, such as an ingredient list, but not an independent health conclusion. We disclose material funding or conflicts when they affect how a source should be read. We remove or qualify a claim when we cannot verify its support.

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

Evidence hierarchy

Study design changes what a result can show. We label the evidence class in the bibliography so a laboratory hazard signal is not presented as if it were a human disease outcome.

“NIEHS-funded research has revealed associations between PFAS exposures and a variety of adverse human health outcomes, including immune system dysfunction, impaired child development, and cancer.”National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, US National Institutes of Health. Primary source. The statement reports associations and does not claim that every PFAS exposure causes these outcomes.

Authorship and review status

The current publisher is the Untoxed Health Editorial Team. It is accountable for claim checks, source selection, evidence classification, counterevidence, corrections, and scheduled updates. No named individual author has yet been assigned across the site, and no named clinician or scientist currently reviews every health page. We state this directly rather than inventing a person or credential.

To publish a named author or reviewer, the owner must supply exactly six facts for that person: full name; role; relevant qualifications; a short biography; a conflict-of-interest disclosure; and the specific pages reviewed, with the real review date for each page. A page must not be described as individually medically or scientifically reviewed until all six facts are available.

Conflicts of interest

Untoxed Health earns revenue from affiliate commissions on product links. The programs 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 program 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 reflects the most recent public report available when we last reviewed each utility. The review date is shown on each water page. Verify current conditions with the utility.
• 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.