Is cetyl alcohol comedogenic?
Short answer
No concern found: No concern found in the included sourcesNo source included in this dataset reports a comedogenicity concern for cetyl alcohol. As with the other fatty alcohols here, the only citation on the record establishes ingredient identity rather than comedogenicity, so the reviewed literature is silent on the question rather than reassuring about it. The useful thing this page can tell you is which ingredient you are actually looking at, because cetyl alcohol is routinely conflated with two different materials — the drying solvent alcohols it is not related to, and cetearyl alcohol, which is a blend that contains it.
Recorded as Cetyl Alcohol · dataset record cetyl-alcohol · reviewed 2026-08-06
What the evidence actually is
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 Cetyl alcohol
For two reasons that pull in opposite directions. The first is the word 'alcohol': cosmetic labels use it for two chemically unrelated groups, and advice written about the short-chain solvent alcohols that evaporate off skin circulates as though it applied to the long-chain fatty alcohols that do not. The second is that cetyl alcohol appears on pore-clogging lists at a different position from cetearyl alcohol on the same lists, which is difficult to explain given that cetearyl alcohol is partly cetyl alcohol.
Where the circulating rating for Cetyl alcohol comes from
Circulating scales tend to place cetyl alcohol slightly higher than cetearyl or stearyl alcohol, and this project could not trace any of those three numbers to a checkable assessment. The disagreement between them is worth noticing on its own. A rating system that scores a blend and one of its own components differently is reporting something about how the lists were assembled rather than about skin, and no amount of precision in the number would fix that.
Names Cetyl alcohol appears under
Declared as Cetyl Alcohol, and also as hexadecan-1-ol or palmityl alcohol. It is one of the two components of Cetearyl Alcohol, the other being Stearyl Alcohol, and all three are declared separately with their own records here. Cetyl Esters, Cetearyl Glucoside and Ceteareth-20 are different materials despite the shared prefix, and are not in this dataset. Matching is by declared name, so which of these is printed on your label changes the result.
Recognised in this dataset as Cetyl Alcohol, and through the recorded aliases hexadecan-1-ol, palmityl 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 cetyl alcohol
Is cetyl alcohol the same as cetearyl alcohol?
No. Cetearyl alcohol is a blend of cetyl alcohol and stearyl alcohol. They are declared separately and each has its own record here, so a conclusion you have reached about one does not automatically carry to the other — and this tool reports whichever name is actually printed on your label.
Is cetyl alcohol the drying kind of alcohol?
No. It is a long-chain fatty alcohol used to thicken and stabilise creams. The alcohols written about as drying are short-chain solvents such as Alcohol Denat. and Isopropyl Alcohol, which evaporate. The two groups share a word on the label and very little else.
Why do the lists rate cetyl alcohol higher than cetearyl alcohol?
This project cannot explain it, because it could not verify where either number came from. It is a reasonable thing to be suspicious about: cetearyl alcohol is partly cetyl alcohol, so a scale that separates them by a point or more is making a distinction its own sources do not appear to support.
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).