Turn a jar of face cream around and you’ll find a block of small print that looks like a botany exam set by a chemist. It’s easier to read than it looks.

Learn four rules and an ingredient list stops being a wall of Latin. It starts answering real questions: what is mostly in here, what is only a trace, and what might my skin not like?

The order is the first clue

In the EU, where we make everything, ingredients are listed by INCI name, a shared system used on cosmetics in much of the world. The list runs in descending order of weight, as the ingredients go into the batch. Whatever comes first is what there is most of.

In most serums and creams, that first word is Aqua, plain water. Not always, though. In our Chamomile Water Toner, the first ingredient is Chamomilla Recutita Flower Water, because the flower water takes the place of plain water and makes up 70% of the formula.

The 1% line

The rule few people hear about: ingredients above 1% must appear in order of weight. Below 1%, they can be listed in any order.

So the second half of a list is a crowd with no queue. An ingredient at 0.9% may come after one at 0.01%. You can’t see where the line falls, but there is a useful hint: some preservatives, such as phenoxyethanol, are capped at 1% in the EU, so anything listed after them is at 1% or less.

This is why position can flatter an ingredient. An extract listed fifth sounds important. If the four ingredients before it add up to 99%, it isn’t.

Plant names tell you the part and the form

INCI names for plants follow a pattern: genus, species, the part of the plant, then what was made from it. Our own key ingredients show the range:

• Leaf extract. Rhododendron Ferrugineum Leaf Extract comes from alpine rose leaves, not its pink flowers.

• Flower water. Chamomilla Recutita Flower Water is what condenses when chamomile flowers are steam-distilled.

• Fruit oil. Hippophae Rhamnoides Fruit Oil is pressed from the sea buckthorn berry, not its seed.

• Callus culture extract. Leontopodium Alpinum Callus Culture Extract is edelweiss grown as plant cells in a lab, because the wild flower is protected.

Names can also change between the front of a bottle and the back. “Hyaluronic acid” on the front usually appears as Sodium Hyaluronate in the list, the salt form that dissolves in water.

What “parfum” means, and where allergens fit

Parfum (in the US, “fragrance”) is a single word that can stand for a blend of dozens of materials, and makers can keep the recipe of that blend private.

What they can’t hide is a set of known fragrance allergens. EU rules require them to be named one by one when they pass 0.001% in a product you leave on your skin, or 0.01% in one you rinse off. That list has long held 26 substances and is being extended to more than 80.

You’ll recognize a few: linalool, limonene, citral, geraniol. They also occur naturally in essential oils, so a product scented only with plant oils can still list them. If you know you react to one, check the end of the list.

Two more terms are worth separating. “Unscented” can still mean a masking scent was added to cover the smell of the raw materials. “Fragrance-free” should mean nothing was added for scent at all. Our face formulas have no added fragrance. The Pine & Rose Body Oil is scented with essential oils, and its allergens are listed.

How we print our percentages

An ingredient list gives you the order, not the amount. So on the front of every Moraine bottle we print the key ingredients with their percentages. The full INCI list is on the back, and one tap away on every product page.

Take the Alpine Rose Serum. The front reads Niacinamide 4% · Alpine rose 2%. On the back, both sit above the 1% line, in that order: Niacinamide, then Rhododendron Ferrugineum Leaf Extract.

The Edelweiss Hydrating Serum shows the other side of the rule. Its edelweiss extract, at 0.5%, sits below the line, where its position tells you nothing about how much is there. That’s exactly why we print the number.

The list tells you the order. The percentage tells you the amount. You should get both.

One honest footnote. The percentage we print for a plant extract is the amount of that extract as it goes into the batch. Most extracts arrive in a carrier such as glycerin or water, so 2% alpine rose extract is not 2% pure leaf. We print it this way because it’s the number we can measure and stand behind.

What a list can’t tell you

An ingredient list is a fair start, not the whole story. It won’t tell you where the oats were grown, how fresh the oil was, the pH of the formula or how it feels on your skin.

That’s why each of our key ingredients has its own page, with its origin, the coordinates of where it’s grown or made, and the formulas it goes into. Read the label first. Then ask the questions it can’t answer.