How are picks made?
We read each product's Amazon listing on a recorded date: the rating histogram, the number of ratings, the reviews Amazon shows, and who is actually selling it. Where a claim can be checked against a public record, we check that too. A product needs at least 4.1 stars, more than 100 ratings and 60% of ratings in the four- and five-star band to be ranked. Exceptions are named on the page.
The order is our judgment. We write down the reasons for it. There is no score. Our methodology has the detail.
What do we refuse to link, and why?
We don't link five brands that have no authorized storefront on Amazon US: SkinCeuticals, La Mer, Sisley Paris, Vintner's Daughter and Biologique Recherche. Their Amazon listings are supplied by third parties, and buyers report broken seals and spoiled stock. They still rank where buyers put them.
We also don't link a specific listing when its seller doesn't check out, when it has no buy box, or when the listing title doesn't clearly match the product we wrote about. In those cases the card says so. We never link a listing we haven't inspected on a recorded date. Without that, we link an Amazon search instead.
How is the site paid?
Only through Amazon. The Skin Score is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
A higher commission never moves a product up a list, and it never breaks a tie. Brands don't pay for placement. We don't run display ads. If a paid relationship ever touches a page, that page will say so at the top.
How do we use AI?
We use AI tools to help draft pages, sort through listings and check our writing against these rules. They don't decide what gets ranked or linked. Every figure is checked against the listing or record it came from, and dated, before it's published. A figure we can't check doesn't run.
What do we never do?
- Claim to have tested or used a product.
- Print a buyer quote that isn't verbatim, or combine two quotes into one. Every quote is logged with the listing and the review date.
- Print an Amazon rating, review count or price without the date we read it.
- Move an Updated date without changing the content.
- Borrow medical authority for a product without naming the study or the doctor behind the claim.
How do corrections work?
Email theskinscoreinfo@gmail.com with the page and what's wrong. If we agree, we fix the page, add a line to its What-changed note, and log the correction below. If we disagree, we'll tell you why.
Corrections log
Newest first. Each entry says what was wrong and what we did.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Removed the “Skin Score” out of 10 from 38 rankings, 280 scores in all. The scores fell by exactly 0.2 per place, so they restated the order rather than measuring anything.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Removed review percentages such as “nearly 50% of positive reviews”. We couldn't source them, and since 12 September 2026 Amazon doesn't let anyone count reviews.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Amazon ratings, review counts and prices that had no date beside them were either re-read and dated or removed.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Removed 45 Amazon links to the five brands we don't link. Our own policy excluded them; the links had slipped through.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Removed 32 buyer quotes we could no longer trace to a dated record. We replaced them with quotes read on 23 September 2026 and logged with the listing.
- 24 September 2026, sitewide. Thirty pages showed an Updated date of 13 September while their structured data said June to August. Dates now agree, and they move only when content changes.
- 24 September 2026, three pages. The eye cream ranking, the La Mer vs SK-II comparison and the vitamin C ranking carried publication dates before the site existed. They now show 3 June 2026, the first deploy.
- 24 September 2026, night creams. Removed the buy button for La Prairie Skin Caviar Luxe Sleep Mask. The listing had no buy box and 19 ratings.
- 24 September 2026, About page. Removed “10K+ reviews analyzed”, which no record supported, and “6 categories”, which should have been 8.
- 24 September 2026, several rankings. Removed buy links where the listing showed no seller when we checked on 23 September 2026, including SK-II Facial Treatment Essence and VEGAMOUR GRO. Where a linked listing was a different size or product from the one we describe, the link now goes to an Amazon search instead.
- 24 September 2026, category hubs. Set the body, cleanser, eye cream and face oil hubs to noindex. Each links only a few guides, so they stay for navigation but out of search results.
- 24 September 2026, removed pages. Retired the deals page, which no longer did anything useful. Retired the celebrity skincare page, whose claims about named people we couldn't source. Merged four gift guides into one, and two overlapping vitamin C rankings into one. Old addresses redirect.