Is cetearyl alcohol comedogenic?

Short answer

No concern found in the included sources

No source included in this dataset reports a comedogenicity concern for cetearyl alcohol, though the only citation on the record establishes ingredient identity rather than comedogenicity, so the reviewed literature is effectively silent on the question. The more common confusion is upstream of that: cetearyl alcohol is a fatty alcohol used to thicken and stabilise creams, not the volatile solvent alcohol people are usually worried about when they see the word on a label.

Recorded as Cetearyl Alcohol · dataset record cetearyl-alcohol · reviewed 2026-08-06

What the evidence actually is

Secondary or reference source

A reference or regulatory source rather than a study that measured comedogenicity. In this dataset that most often means the source establishes only that the name refers to a recognised cosmetic ingredient.

What the sources report

A recognised cosmetic ingredient. No source included in this dataset reports a comedogenicity concern for it.

What this does not cover

This states only that the included sources raised no concern for this name. The corpus is small, so this is not a finding of proven non-comedogenicity, and it says nothing about the finished product.

Why people ask about Cetearyl alcohol

Almost always because of the word 'alcohol'. Cosmetic labels carry two chemically unrelated groups under that word. Short-chain solvent alcohols such as Alcohol Denat. and Isopropyl Alcohol evaporate, and are the ones written about as drying. Long-chain fatty alcohols such as cetearyl, cetyl and stearyl alcohol do not evaporate and are used as thickeners and emulsion stabilisers. Advice written about the first group circulates as though it applied to the second.

Where the circulating rating for Cetearyl alcohol comes from

Cetearyl alcohol usually appears on circulating lists at the low end of the scale, and as with most entries there, this project could not trace the number to a checkable assessment. It is worth saying plainly that the rating is not the main error attached to this ingredient. The bigger one is the assumption that it belongs to the drying-alcohol family at all, and no number on a 0–5 scale would have corrected that.

Names Cetearyl alcohol appears under

Declared as Cetearyl Alcohol, and also as cetostearyl alcohol or cetyl stearyl alcohol. It is a blend of cetyl alcohol and stearyl alcohol, each of which is also a separate declared ingredient with its own record in this dataset. It should not be confused with Cetearyl Glucoside or Ceteareth-20, which are different materials and are not in this dataset.

Recognised in this dataset as Cetearyl Alcohol, and through the recorded aliases cetostearyl alcohol, cetyl stearyl alcohol. Matching is exact: there is no fuzzy matching anywhere in this tool, so a name not listed here is reported as unrecognised rather than guessed at.

Questions about cetearyl alcohol

Is cetearyl alcohol the alcohol that dries out skin?

No. It is a long-chain fatty alcohol, which is a different class of material from the short-chain solvent alcohols such as Alcohol Denat. that evaporate off the skin. They share a word on the label and very little else.

Is cetearyl alcohol the same as cetyl alcohol?

Not quite. Cetearyl alcohol is a blend of cetyl and stearyl alcohols. All three are declared separately and each has its own record here, so this tool reports whichever name is actually printed on your label rather than treating them as one entry.

Sources cited on this page

These are the sources attached to this record. Nothing on this page is drawn from anything else.

  • Cosmetic ingredient database (CosIng)

    European Commission, Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, 2026. Regulator.

    Used only to establish that an INCI name refers to a recognised cosmetic ingredient. Presence in CosIng does not mean an ingredient is approved, safe, or non-comedogenic, and this dataset never treats an identity citation as evidence about comedogenicity.

Record reviewed 2026-08-06 by pore-checker prototype dataset compilation (not clinically reviewed).