What it does
Ick Check shows you what’s really in your beauty and personal care products, right from your phone.
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01
Scan or paste a label
Point your camera at the barcode, or paste the ingredient list from the back of the bottle.
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02
See what got flagged, and who flagged it
Each flagged ingredient names the public list it comes from. No mystery scores.
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03
Share your routine scorecard
Add products to one scorecard and send it to the group chat or pin it.
Flags are not safety verdicts or medical advice.
Background
After I participated in a former accelerator, doing research on Gen Z, I’ve been obsessed with sustainability and longevity. There is an incredible amount of misinformation and mislabeling in many of our consumer products and goods, and the beauty industry is no different. For personal reasons, I began to dive deep into the products I was using, particularly endocrine disruptors, because coming out of COVID left me with an incredible amount of energy depletion, emotionally, physically, and mentally. I needed to do everything possible to get back to my energetic self. I might be a Millennial, but out of the research, Gen Z cares just as much about their self-care as we do, or at least the portion of Millennials who are not completely “agro.” In fact, 43% of Gen Z look for that “Non-Toxic” label and absolutely detest “greenwashing.” In essence, they are asking for “the receipt” from their products, with an increased use of ingredient-checker apps. And since they lean toward physical retail for the experience, it certainly helps to ensure everything checks out. You’re welcome.
And Gen Z, I know you didn’t ask me to do anything, but I needed it just as much as you, so I hope you get some benefit.
43%
of Gen Z look for that “Non-Toxic” label
User Journey
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Homepage/
Discovery - Scanner or Ingredient Entry
- Scorecard & Share
Direct competitors: ingredient scanner apps
| App | What it does | How it judges products | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yuka | Scans food and cosmetics | Four color-coded risk levels | 500,000+ cosmetics; about 5M users in the UK alone |
| Think Dirty | Scans for long-term health concerns | “Clean” to “dirty” rating | 2M+ US and Canada products; 4.8 stars from 36,000+ reviews |
| EWG Healthy Living (Skin Deep) | Rates beauty, food and cleaning products | Hazard ratings | 120,000+ products; 3.3 stars, with complaints about ease of use |
| INCI Beauty | French ingredient database and app | 1 to 20 score | About 15,000 ingredients |
| OnSkin | Scans barcodes, photos or names | Flags allergens and endocrine disruptors, matched to your skin profile | 2M+ products; also has a routine builder |
| CodeCheck, SkinSAFE | Allergy and sensitive-skin filters | “Free from” style labels | Niche |
Adjacent competitors
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Routine and skin-type tools
Good Face, Skinsort, Skincarisma. These focus on what works for your skin, not just what’s flagged. Good Face also lets users share.
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Pregnancy and baby safety scanners
Oli and Little Bean came up in my search. They cover the fertility angle, so if I go that way, these are the ones to study. I haven’t reviewed them in detail.
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Retailer tools
Sephora’s app has an AI skin scan. Retailers could add ingredient flags at any point.
Where the category is weak, and where Ick Check fits
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Scores are under fire.
A Marie Claire investigation quotes cosmetic chemists criticizing these apps. They judge ingredients without knowing the dose, flag approved preservatives like phenoxyethanol as “poor,” and disagree with each other. The same CeraVe cleanser scored “poor” on Yuka but green on INCI Beauty. Ick Check’s choice to show flags with a named source and no score answers that criticism directly.
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Almost none are social.
They’re built for private checking in a store aisle. A shareable scorecard designed for Gen Z, Pinterest and group chats is Ick Check’s real growth angle.
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No download needed.
Ick Check opens instantly from a link. The others are installed apps.
Metrics
Once I confirm the thing even works, I’d want to look at:
North Star
# of scans/
ingredient inputs
Product engagement
Supporting Metrics
- # of shares link copied, downloads, stories created
- # of homepage views
Guardrail
Latency/Timeouts
Next Steps
- Going to push this to live in its MVP glory
- Going to plan links in personal channels to see how things fare
- Test/Measure/Learn
- And if it doesn’t work as intended, de-link and pull down