How to read a skincare label in Pakistan
Almost every skincare argument in Pakistan — is this real, is it strong enough, is it safe, is it worth the money — can be settled by the back of the pack rather than the front. The problem is that the back of the pack is written in an international ingredient nomenclature that nobody explains, and the informal end of this market relies on that. This is how to read one.
The ingredient list is ordered, and the order is the information
INCI lists run in descending order of concentration down to 1%. Below 1% the order is arbitrary. So an ingredient in the first five is present in a meaningful amount, and one sitting after the fragrance and the preservative is almost certainly under 1%.
This single rule invalidates most botanical marketing. A cream sold on argan oil that lists argan oil second-to-last contains a trace of it. Preservatives such as phenoxyethanol are legally capped around 1%, so their position in the list is a rough marker for where the 1% line falls — everything after it is a rounding error.
A percentage on the front is a claim you can hold a brand to
"With niacinamide" is unfalsifiable. "5% niacinamide" is a number you can compare against research, against other products, and against the price. Brands that state percentages have accepted a constraint; brands that do not have kept their options open.
There is a legitimate reason not to publish a full formula — it is the one thing a small brand actually owns. But there is no legitimate reason to hide the concentration of the headline active you named the product after. The gap between those two is where most of the category's dishonesty lives.
Batch number, manufacture date, expiry date
Every legitimately produced cosmetic carries a batch or lot number and a date. A pack with no batch number cannot be traced, cannot be recalled, and cannot be verified with the manufacturer. Its absence is the clearest single signal that something is wrong.
This matters more here than in markets with tighter enforcement, because relabelled and refilled packaging is a real trade. A batch number is also how you find out whether a product you have had in a Karachi cupboard for two summers is still within its life. Heat shortens that considerably.
The little open-jar symbol
The period-after-opening symbol — an open jar with 6M, 12M or 24M printed inside it — tells you how long the product is stable after you first open it, which is a different and usually shorter window than the printed expiry date.
Vitamin C is the ingredient where this matters most. An ascorbic acid serum that has gone deep orange or brown has oxidised, and it is no longer doing what you bought it for regardless of the date stamped on the box. In this climate that happens faster than the packaging assumes.
Words that are not regulated and mean nothing on their own
"Dermatologically tested", "non-comedogenic", "chemical-free", "clinically proven", "natural" and "organic" have no enforced definition in this market. They are marketing copy printed in the same font as the facts, which is the point.
"Dermatologically tested" says a dermatologist was involved somewhere; it says nothing about what the test found. "Chemical-free" is not a coherent statement about any physical product. Treat all of them as decoration and go to the ingredient list, which is the only part of the pack that has to be true.
The absences that should stop a purchase
No full ingredient list. No batch number. No manufacturer name and address. Hand-applied or misaligned labelling. A promise of results in days. Any one of these is enough to put a product down.
The last one is the least obvious and the most useful. Skin does not turn over fast enough for a cosmetic to visibly change tone in a week. Products that reliably do that in this market are usually carrying an undeclared steroid or a skin-lightening agent that should not be in an unsupervised cream, and the damage they cause takes far longer to undo than the effect took to appear.
Where our own labels sit against this
Elluvi publishes the concentration of every active on the pack and on the product page: 10% niacinamide and 1% zinc PCA in Hydra Glow Serum, 10% ascorbic acid in the Vitamin C Serum, 0.3% retinol with 2% alpha arbutin in Hydra Glow Cream, 5% glycolic acid with 5% niacinamide in the Brightening Face Wash.
We publish those numbers because we would rather be compared on them than on adjectives, and because a page that tells you exactly what is in a bottle is the one thing that survives being checked. It also means when a competitor states nothing, the comparison makes itself.
What a label cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether a formula is well made. Two products with identical percentages of the same active can behave completely differently depending on pH, the base they sit in, and whether the active is stabilised.
So the label is a filter, not a verdict. It rules out the products that are hiding something, which is most of the ones worth ruling out. After that you are into patch testing, giving something four to twelve weeks, and paying attention to what your own skin does — which no packaging can do for you.
Common questions
Looking for step-by-step answers instead? Our guides cover routines, serums and how to use each active ingredient.