What is in your shampoo? Paste the list and see.

How to check a label

1. Copy the list from the bottle or the shop's product page. The "Ingredients:" heading can stay.
2. Paste it into the checker and choose Check ingredients.
3. Look at the first few names after water: they are the cleansers, and they decide most of how a shampoo washes.
4. Read the summary: how many ingredients an official source flags, and how many we know nothing about.

Start with the cleansers

After water, a shampoo's first names are usually its surfactants, the ingredients that lift oil and dirt and make lather. Names that look alike can behave differently: Sodium Lauryl Sulfate and Sodium Laureth Sulfate are different ingredients, and a second, milder surfactant such as Cocamidopropyl Betaine is often paired with them.

"Sulfate-free" tells you what was left out, not what replaced it. The checker shows which cleansers a sulfate-free formula uses instead.

What the checker flags on a shampoo label

Most shampoo ingredients have nothing on record from the sources we use, and the checker says so rather than calling them fine. The flags you are most likely to see are preservatives, which the EU allows only up to a set concentration, and fragrance allergens such as Limonene or Linalool, which EU labels must name once they pass a threshold. A flag names the regulation entry it comes from, with a link.

A rinse-off product is on your scalp for a minute, and a label gives no amounts. So a flag says what a rule or classification covers, never that this shampoo is unsafe.