"100% Argan Oil" Is the Sixth Line on the Ingredient List of the Lowest-Scoring Product We Sell
We sell a hair essence with "100% Moroccan Argan Oil" printed on the front. The ingredient list on the back has thirteen lines. Argan is the sixth.
Ahead of it, in this order: cyclopentasiloxane, disiloxane, dimethiconol. Three silicones in a row. Then jojoba seed oil, then camellia seed oil, and then, finally, Argania Spinosa Kernel Oil.
The product is the JHP Cosmetics Argan Oil Hair Essence and it scores 8.0 in our screening, which is the lowest number we have given anything in a catalogue of fifty-six products. We went looking for what the "100%" is actually attached to, half expecting to catch somebody out. As far as we can tell it isn't a lie. That turned out to be the more useful finding.
"100% argan oil" is a claim about a raw material somebody bought, not about the bottle it ended up in. Korean law puts every ingredient on the package in descending order of content, but only down to one per cent — below that the order is free, and so is the order of fragrance. Argan sits sixth here, behind three silicones, and we cannot tell you whether that means "less than the silicones" or "under one per cent, in whatever order the formulator typed it", because we have never asked the supplier where the line falls. The silicones are what make the hair feel slippery. The argan is what made you pick up the bottle.
What the hundred per cent is attached to
There are two different sentences hiding inside "100% argan oil". One is about a drum of oil in a warehouse: the argan that went into this formula was pure argan, not argan cut with sunflower or refined down to something cheaper. The other is about the product on your shelf: this bottle is argan and nothing else. The first is a supplier specification. The second would be a very unusual hair essence.
We do sell the second kind, so we know what it looks like. Our Pure Somme organic jojoba oil has exactly one line on its ingredient list. One. That is the shape of a bottle that really is a single oil, and it looks nothing like the JHP list.
Korea's Cosmetics Act requires the full ingredient list on the package under Article 10, and Article 13 prohibits labelling and advertising that misleads. The enforcement rule attaches a schedule of claim types a company has to be able to substantiate if the regulator asks. None of that machinery is built to stop a phrase on the front from describing an input while the list on the back describes the output. Both sentences are true. They are answering different questions, and nothing on the package tells you that.
So the claim is doing real work. It says the argan wasn't diluted before it arrived. It says nothing at all about how much of it arrived.
Descending order, and the point where it stops meaning anything
The ordering rule is the part most people half-remember correctly. Ingredients run from most to least, which is right. What gets dropped is the cut-off: at and below one per cent, a company may list what remains in any order it likes, and fragrance and colourants get the same freedom regardless of where they fall.
Which means every ingredient list has an invisible seam in it. Above the seam, position is information. Below it, position is typing.
We do not know where that seam falls on this bottle.
Argan at position six might mean there is genuinely less argan than dimethiconol, which would be a real ranking and a real answer. Or it might mean that everything from position four downward is under one per cent and the formulator happened to type jojoba, then camellia, then argan. We have never asked JHP which it is. That is a hole in how we screen rather than a hole in the law — the law lets a brand keep the number, and we simply never went and knocked on the door.
We could not open the current text of the labelling annex this week. The government legal database served us a page that never loaded its content. We are describing the rule from secondary sources and flagging that, rather than pretending we read the annex.
The silicones are doing the job the argan is being sold for
Cyclopentasiloxane is first on the list, and it is volatile. It spreads a film quickly, carries heavier material out along the hair shaft with it, and then evaporates off. What stays behind is the dimethiconol, which does not evaporate.
That pairing is the entire sensory promise of a hair essence. Slip while you work it through, shine once it dries, less frizz because there is a film sitting on the cuticle. Argan oil contributes something here — it is mostly oleic and linoleic acid, with tocopherols — but what your hands register at eight in the morning is silicone.
We graded cyclopentasiloxane mid and the two other silicones low, and it is worth being straight about why. That mid is not a statement about your hair. Cyclopentasiloxane went through European regulatory review as a persistent substance and picked up restrictions in rinse-off products; our risk column noticed the regulatory attention and turned it into a flag. The column cannot currently record whether a flag came from an environmental dossier or from a patch test on human skin.
So we flagged the silicone that leaves your hair within minutes and cleared the one that stays on it all day. Read back like that, it does not work as a consumer-facing risk signal, and we have now said so in four separate articles without having fixed the field.
Four of the thirteen lines are perfume
The last five entries on the list are Fragrance (Parfum), hydroxycitronellal, limonene, linalool and citral. Four of those are named fragrance allergens, printed by name because European rules require separate declaration once they pass a threshold.
Hydroxycitronellal is the only high flag in the entire product, and it is most of the reason 8.0 is 8.0. Take the fragrance block out of this formula and what remains is three silicones, three plant oils, panthenol and a vitamin E ester — a list that would score in the mid nines next to the other plain oils we sell.
We have already published a count of which of our products declare fragrance and which quietly do not, so we will not rerun that argument here. The number that matters for this article is narrower. On a thirteen-line list, four lines are perfume, three lines are silicone, and one line is the thing printed on the front.
What our screening found
Our worst-scoring product has a front label we cannot fault. The 8.0 comes almost entirely from a declared fragrance block — one high flag, three mid — and not from the "100%" claim, which describes its raw material accurately. What we can fault is us. We have never asked this supplier where the one-per-cent line falls, which means we have been reading position as though it were quantity, in a catalogue built on reading ingredient lists properly. We are asking now. If we get a number back we will publish it here, including if the number turns out to be 0.3%.
JHP Cosmetics Argan Oil Hair Essence 120ml
A silicone-led shine essence that also contains argan. The lowest score we have given anything, driven by a declared fragrance block with one high-flag allergen in it, hydroxycitronellal. Skip it if fragrance is a problem for you.
The practical takeaway
Read the front of a bottle as a claim about an input and the back as a description of the output. Both are allowed to be true at the same time, and usually are.
When you turn it over, find the silicones and emollients first — dimethicone, dimethiconol, cyclopentasiloxane, cetearyl alcohol, the seed oils. Where the hero ingredient sits relative to those is the only ranking you get for free. If the hero is below three of them, you are holding a silicone product with a botanical name on it.
Which is not automatically a bad buy. Silicone does the thing a hair essence is supposed to do, and does it better than argan does. You should just know which molecule the premium is paying for.
A brand that will tell you the percentage is worth more than any phrase on the front. Almost none of them will. We have now asked one, and we will report back either way — including the way where nobody replies. Our full scoring method is on the awards page, and we have written before about which label claims carry weight and about why the bigger bottle is often the worse deal.
- 「화장품법」 제10조 (화장품의 기재사항) — mandatory full ingredient disclosure on the package.
- 「화장품법」 제13조 (부당한 표시·광고 행위 등의 금지) — prohibition on misleading labelling and advertising.
- 「화장품법 시행규칙」 [별표 4] 화장품 표시·광고의 표시기준 및 표시방법 — descending order by content, with the exemption at and below 1% and for fragrance and colourants. Read via secondary sources this week; the annex text itself would not load.
- 「화장품법 시행규칙」 [별표 5] 표시·광고 실증 대상 — claim types requiring substantiation on request.
- Regulation (EU) 655/2013 laying down common criteria for claims used in relation to cosmetic products — truthfulness and evidential support.
- DHALIORA screening data: 56 products, 1,920 ingredient rows, full recount 2026-09-06.
