The register

Unproven Claims

Somebody has to write down what was actually tested. Every entry here takes one beauty claim, restates it as a proposition somebody could go and check, and records what turned up — including, often, that nobody has looked. No brand is named in a verdict. Nothing here is sponsored, and nothing here links to a shop.

The useful column is not the verdict. It is the one next to it, which says what kind of evidence is missing — because “there is no evidence” is nearly always false, and the accurate answer is usually that the study exists and belongs to something else.

1 claim on file · last revised 3 September 2026 · How this works · JSON · CSV

Evidence position

Any Established Partially established Thinly supported Untested as claimed Not established No adequate source found

What is missing

Any True absence Supplier-generated only Characterisation failure Claim transfer Category error Plausibility gap Protocol untested Claim inflation Indication mismatch

Subject

Any Skincare Injectables & devices Supplements Haircare Treatments & spa Makeup Labels & language

Rosemary oil works as well as minoxidil
Thinly supported

One 2015 trial compared rosemary oil with minoxidil 2%, not the 5% most people buy, and had no placebo arm. Nothing has replicated it.

Claim inflation Last searched 3 September 2026

Where this stops

This register records the state of published evidence. It does not tell you a product does nothing, and it never says a company is lying — both would be claims about the world that would need proving, where “we searched here, on this date, against this bar, and found this” is a claim about my own reading and can be checked by anyone who repeats it.

The bar is written down in advance, so “nothing met it” means something: A human study, published and peer-reviewed, with a comparator — placebo, vehicle, or an active with its own evidence — reporting the endpoint the claim is actually about. In-vitro work, animal models, uncontrolled before-and-after series, consumer-perception surveys and unpublished supplier data are read and reported, but they do not clear the bar on their own.

The positions and the absence types, defined →

Rosemary oil works as well as minoxidil