Is Mineral Oil Comedogenic?
Mineral Oil is rated 0/5 in published comedogenicity lists — rated low on published lists.
Contested Source: Fulton 1989. Published values disagree or depend on grade and vehicle — the note says which value is shown and why. How we rate
Also appears on labels as
- paraffinum liquidum
- liquid paraffin
- white mineral oil
What it is
Cosmetic mineral oil — paraffinum liquidum on EU-style labels — is a highly refined liquid blend of saturated hydrocarbons. Like petrolatum, its cosmetic grade is purified far beyond the industrial materials that share its name.
Why it's rated 0/5
Refined cosmetic-grade mineral oil tested non-comedogenic in the published lineage: large, inert molecules that sit on the surface as an occlusive rather than entering follicles. Its persistent bad reputation traces to crude industrial grades and to conflating "occlusive" with "pore-clogging" — the same distinction petrolatum illustrates.
On the label
Appears as Mineral Oil, Paraffinum Liquidum, or Liquid Paraffin. Common in baby oil (where it is essentially the whole formula), cleansing oils, and classic creams.
When this rating can't be trusted
The 0/5 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 0/5 rating for Mineral Oil be trusted?
Contested Published values for this ingredient disagree, or depend on grade and vehicle — the note on the row says which value is shown and why. The disagreement itself is the finding: expect different lists to give different numbers. Source: Fulton 1989.
A low number does not certify a product: a formula can still clog pores through its other ingredients or their combination. Full reasoning and bibliography.
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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