How to Read a Cosmetics Ingredient List (INCI)

Pure Decode Skin · July 29, 2026

Flip over any cosmetics package and you'll find a dense block of alphabet soup: "Aqua," "Glycerin," "Parfum"… This is INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients), a naming system used worldwide to list cosmetic ingredients. Once you know the rules, an ingredient list becomes far easier to read — no translation required.

The basic rule: listed by concentration

Under INCI, ingredients are generally listed in descending order of concentration. That means the ingredients near the top of the list make up the largest share of the formula. In most products, the first five or six ingredients account for the bulk of the formula, so glancing at that top section tells you a lot about what the product actually is. Ingredients near the bottom of the list, by contrast, are usually present in tiny amounts — think preservatives, fragrance, and colorants.

There's a catch, though: ingredients present below 1% can be listed in any order, so the tail end of the list won't tell you exact concentrations. Even so, developing the habit of checking what's up top is a great first step toward reading ingredient lists with confidence.

Common ingredient names to know

INCI names are rooted in Latin and English, but memorizing the ones that show up again and again makes labels much easier to decode.

• Aqua / Water — water
• Glycerin — a humectant (moisturizer)
• Alcohol / Ethanol — alcohol
• Fragrance / Parfum — fragrance
• Sodium Hyaluronate — a salt form of hyaluronic acid
• Tocopherol — vitamin E
• Niacinamide — niacinamide (vitamin B3)
• Dimethicone — a silicone
• Sodium Benzoate / Phenoxyethanol — common preservatives
• CI + a number (e.g., CI 19140) — a colorant

Korean and Chinese labels follow INCI too

Korean cosmetics packaging carries the Hangul label "전성분" (all ingredients), and Chinese packaging says "成分" or "配料表," but the alphabetic ingredient names underneath are, almost always, the same universal INCI names used everywhere else. In other words, you don't need to read Hangul or Chinese characters — spotting the INCI names in Latin letters is enough to recognize water, glycerin, fragrance, and the rest, just as you would on a Japanese or American product. You don't need to translate the local-language text at all; the shortcut is to zero in on the INCI portion.