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Fungal acne · Ingredient check
Paste any product's ingredient list. We flag the fatty acids, esters, polysorbates and yeast ferments reported to feed Malassezia — and the classes that don't. It over-flags by nature (the science is in-vitro), so treat flags as a shortlist to patch-test, not a sentence.
We match each ingredient against classes reported to feed Malassezia (fungal acne): free fatty acids in the ~C11–C24 range, esters that hydrolyse back into them, polysorbate and sorbitan emulsifiers, and fungal (yeast) ferments — plus a short list of classes that are NOT a food source (inert hydrocarbons, silicones, short C8–C10 lipids, simple humectants). The trigger classes come from the derm literature summarised by Gaitanis et al. and the reference list SkinSort's checker cites. Matching is literal substring matching on ingredient names.
Read this as a screen, not a verdict. The entire trigger list rests on IN-VITRO (lab-dish) studies of which lipids Malassezia can metabolise — that is not the same as a study showing these ingredients cause breakouts on real skin, and growth in those studies was strongly concentration-dependent (some fatty acids fed the yeast at low doses but killed it at higher ones). So this checker OVER-FLAGS: it catches ubiquitous, usually-harmless emulsifiers and thickeners (glyceryl stearate, PEG-100 stearate, polysorbates) that many fungal-acne-prone people tolerate perfectly well, especially in rinse-off products. Malassezia also lives on nearly everyone's skin; an ingredient 'feeding' it in a dish does not mean it will flare you. Use flags to shortlist things to patch-test, not to fear.