Pore Clogger Checker
4/5

Is Cocoa Butter Comedogenic?

Cocoa Butter is rated 4/5 in published comedogenicity lists — rated high on published lists.

Established Source: Fulton 1989. Primary-source value (original rabbit-ear tables). Still a raw-ingredient test — concentration and formulation change real-world behaviour. How we rate

Also appears on labels as

What it is

Cocoa butter is the fat pressed from cacao beans — solid at room temperature, melting just below skin temperature, built from palmitic, stearic, and oleic triglycerides. The sharp melt is why it is beloved in body butters and bar formats.

Why it's rated 4/5

Cocoa butter scores 4 in the published lineage — unusually high for a natural butter, and a sharp contrast with shea butter at 0 despite similar richness. It is a standing example of why ratings are looked up, not guessed from texture or naturalness.

On the label

Appears as Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter. Most exposure is body care, where skin is generally more tolerant; the rating earns the most attention when it appears in facial creams or lip-area balms.

When this rating can't be trusted

The 4/5 describes the raw ingredient in a rabbit-ear assay, usually at 10% in propylene glycol. It cannot tell you how much is in your product (position on the label is the only clue), what the rest of the formula does to it, or how your skin responds. Finished products containing highly rated ingredients have tested non-comedogenic on human skin (Draelos & DiNardo, JAAD 2006).

Can the 4/5 rating for Cocoa Butter be trusted?

Established This number is the primary-source value and no published disagreement is on record — as solid as a comedogenic rating gets, which is still a screening signal, not a verdict on any product. Source: Fulton 1989.

A flag here means look closer — the AAD 1989 threshold for caution — not this product will break you out. Full reasoning and bibliography.

Non-comedogenic swaps

Picks are products labeled non-comedogenic; we don’t test or endorse.

Where the rating comes from

Ratings on this site come from published comedogenicity literature in the Fulton 1989 lineage — the 0–5 tables compiled from ingredient testing and reproduced across dermatology reference lists since. Where values disagree: a named primary source (Fulton 1989) outranks later unattributed lists, so its value is shown and the others are disclosed in the note; where only compilation lists disagree, the higher-caution value is shown. We never publish an invented number, and we never present one as more certain than its source: every rating carries a confidence tier — established (primary-source value, no disagreement on record), single-source (only the reproduced compilation lists carry it), or contested (published values disagree or depend on grade and vehicle; the note says which value is shown and why). Ingredients we cannot match appear as “not in our database” — unmatched, not cleared: no published list we hold rates them under that name, and that is not a pass.

Our flag threshold follows the American Academy of Dermatology's Invitational Symposium on Comedogenicity (J Am Acad Dermatol 1989): substances scoring 0–2 in the rabbit-ear assay are unlikely to clog pores in humans, while scores above 2 warrant more caution — which is why this site flags 3/5 and up. Read the full methodology and bibliography.

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