About
Telltale Skin is written by Iris Vance. I am a researcher, not a dermatologist and not a licensed esthetician, and nothing on this site diagnoses or treats anything. What I do is read the literature and the regulatory documents, and write down what they actually say, including the parts that are inconvenient for whoever is selling the ingredient.
Why this site starts with your face and not with a product
Most skincare writing is organized the way an expert thinks: by ingredient, by category, by brand. That is backwards for the person reading it, who is standing in a bathroom having just noticed something. So this site is organized the way you actually arrive. What is that on your skin comes first, and the ingredient shows up later, inside the answer, where it means something.
Four different things can put small bumps on a forehead. They look nearly identical in a mirror, and two of them get worse under the treatment the other two need. Sorting that out is more useful than any product recommendation, and it is the part almost nobody writes down.
How ingredients get graded
Every ingredient on this site carries a grade for how strong its evidence is, and the grade is printed before the description rather than buried after it. Four steps: strong, moderate, limited, and in vitro only, which means it has been shown to work on cells in a dish and never on a face.
A brand blog will not print the sentence the evidence is thin, because it is selling the thing. That sentence is most of what I have to offer, so it gets printed here whenever it is true. The full method is here, including what gets an ingredient left off the site entirely.
Three things this site will not do
It will not tell you to see a dermatologist and take a cut. Every plan here has a point where the honest answer is a clinician rather than another serum. The page that helps you judge that carries no affiliate links at all. Commercial options sit in one clearly marked comparison, disclosed at the top, and nowhere else.
It will not pretend to have tested things.Nothing here is hands-on tested, and pages that name products say so rather than dressing research up as experience. Prices come from the manufacturer's own page with a date attached, or they are left out.
It will not promise you a timeline it cannot source. Every plan ends with a clock: what should look different by week two, by week four, and at what point the conclusion is that the approach was wrong rather than that you were impatient. Where the literature has no number, it says so instead of inventing one.
Getting in touch
Corrections are welcome and get made. If something here is out of date, badly sourced, or simply wrong, write to hello@telltaleskin.com.