Why we built Opnjar

The front of a jar tells you what the brand wants you to notice: vitamin C, glow, SPF 50. The back tells you what is in it. That list is the most useful thing on the pack, and the hardest to read. The type is tiny, the names are in Latin or chemistry, and online stores often leave the list out or show only three "key ingredients".

Opnjar puts the full list on one page, in the order the brand prints it, with a line on what each ingredient does.

Where the lists come from

We start with each brand's own website. Our crawler, OpnjarBot, reads the product pages a brand publishes, follows its robots.txt, and keeps one request every 1.5 seconds so it never slows a site down. A list goes live only if it reads like a real label: short names, separated by commas, no marketing sentences. Every product page links back to the page we took it from, with the date we last checked it.

To recognise ingredient names we use CosIng, the European Commission's inventory of more than 23,000 cosmetic ingredients. For the ingredients people ask about most, such as niacinamide, retinol, salicylic acid and the UV filters, we have written our own notes: what each one does, who it suits, and when to take care.

Why India first

India has a large and fast-growing set of skincare brands, many of them sold mainly online, and the ingredient information is scattered across hundreds of brand sites. We cover Indian brands first and will add global brands sold in India after that.

What is not here yet

Some brands print the full list only on the pack, not on their site. Ayurvedic products often list herbs by weight, such as "each 1 g contains", instead of a standard ingredient list. We are working on both. If you run a brand, you can send us your lists and we will publish them with a link to your store.

What we will not do

No ads, no tracking, no accounts. Brands cannot pay to be listed or ranked. If something on a page is wrong, email contact@opnjar.com and we will fix it.