Our sources

Every product fact on Runlow carries a source URL and the date we checked it. Four kinds of source, and nothing else.

Manufacturer and brand websites

A product's own page on the brand's site is the primary source for what it's made of, what it's compatible with, and how it's packaged. When a manufacturer's page discloses nothing beyond a link to a third-party ingredient database, we record that formulation as unknown rather than pull it from that database. See "What we don't use" below for why.

Certifying bodies' own directories

A certification claim is checked against the issuing body's public directory, not the manufacturer's word for it. EPA Safer Choice, USDA BioPreferred, Leaping Bunny, Cruelty Free International, B Corp, MADE SAFE, EWG Verified, Green Seal, FSC, and Energy Star are the programs we check. Where a live directory can't be queried by exact product, we say so and report the manufacturer's own claim as a claim, not a confirmed match.

Regulatory and government publications

For what a certification program actually requires, or what a regulation states, we go to the agency's own publication: EPA, USDA, FDA, and similar bodies. Where a brand lists a personal care ingredient without saying what it does, we give the uses the European Commission's CosIng ingredient database lists for it, marked as such in the table.

Peer-reviewed research

When a post discusses what an ingredient does in the body or the environment, the source is a peer-reviewed paper, read through PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's index. Each one is linked by its PubMed record and its DOI, with the date we read it, and we say whether we read the full paper or its abstract. We report what the study measured, in what, at what dose, and in the authors' own scope, and we state what it did not show beside what it did. A finding in cells is reported as a finding in cells. A study of professional equipment is not applied to a home. We never turn a paper into a verdict that a product is safe or harmful, and we never give medical advice.

What we don't use

We don't scrape or reproduce retailer reviews. Major retailers' terms prohibit it, and star ratings and review counts sourced by automation don't appear anywhere on Runlow.

We also don't pull from SmartLabel or the Consumer Product Information Database, even though both host ingredient disclosures that manufacturers are legally required to publish. Both platforms' own terms prohibit scraping or republishing what they disclose. A mandated disclosure doesn't make the platform hosting it free to reuse. When a manufacturer's own site has nothing beyond a link to one of these, that gap is itself something we report, not a hole we paper over with a source we're not allowed to use.Ingredient disclosure by brand tallies that gap across every product in our records.

What we don't claim

A source and a date don't turn into a safety verdict. We report what a certification requires, what a regulator states, or what a study measured; we don't call a product "safe" or "toxic" in our own voice. When a brand's own site publishes nothing for a fact we looked for, we record the page we read and the date, and say "not published" rather than guessing. And research isn't testing. Unless a post says explicitly that we bought and used a product ourselves, the most we claim is that we researched, compared, or analyzed it.