Skincare Allergy Filter — Product Overview
Medical Disclaimer: This tool is a personal safety aid, not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a dermatologist or allergist for diagnosis and treatment of allergic conditions.
Problem Statement
Reading skincare ingredient labels is time-consuming and error-prone, especially for people managing multiple allergies or sensitivities. Ingredient lists are often long, use unfamiliar chemical names, and vary in formatting between brands — making it easy to miss a known allergen and risk a reaction. Worse, the same ingredient can appear under many different names: “Vitamin C,” “L-Ascorbic Acid,” and “Ascorbate” all refer to the same compound, but a naive string matcher treats them as unrelated. The Skincare Allergy Filter solves the first problem today — a personal allergen profile checked instantly against any ingredient list — and is being built toward solving the second: an intelligent alias-aware matching engine that catches allergens regardless of how they are labelled on a product.
Target User
People with known skincare sensitivities or allergies who want a fast, reliable second opinion before purchasing or using a product — including those managing conditions such as contact dermatitis, fragrance sensitivity, or food-derived ingredient allergies.
Core User Flows
1. Building a Personal Allergen Profile
- User creates an account and logs in.
- User navigates to My Allergies.
- User selects allergens from a structured catalog (grouped by category: contact/topical, food-derived, inhalant, and other).
- For each allergen, the user optionally records:
- Severity level (Mild / Moderate / Severe / Life-Threatening)
- How the allergy was identified (self-reported, doctor diagnosed, allergy test, family history)
- Date symptoms first appeared
- Notes on past reactions
- Profile is saved and used for all future product checks.
2. Checking a Product’s Safety
- User navigates to Check a Product.
- User pastes or types the product’s ingredient list (copied from a label or website).
- The app sanitizes, tokenizes, and normalizes the input (case-insensitive matching).
- The app cross-references the ingredient list against the user’s active allergen profile.
- The result is returned immediately:
- ✅ Safe — no allergens detected in the ingredient list.
- ⚠️ Unsafe — one or more allergens found; the offending ingredient(s) are identified by name.
Feature List
✅ Built
- Structured allergen catalog with 80+ ingredients across four categories (contact/topical, food, inhalant, other), organized into meaningful groups (fragrances, preservatives, acids, botanicals, sunscreen filters, surfactants, etc.)
- Personal allergen profile: add/remove allergens with severity level, source, reaction history, and confirmation status
- Ingredient list safety check with case-insensitive, whitespace-normalized matching
- “Fail fast” detection — flags a product unsafe at the first allergen match and names the offending ingredient
- Admin panel for managing the allergen catalog (activate/deactivate entries, bulk actions with audit logging)
- User authentication via a custom user model
🔄 In Progress
- User-facing forms for creating and editing allergy entries with dynamic allergen selection (category → specific allergen cascading)
- Expanded test coverage for allergy profile CRUD and form validation
📋 Planned
Alias-Aware Matching — the strategic next step
The current engine matches ingredients by normalized string (case-insensitive, whitespace-stripped). This works well for exact names but cannot detect an allergen when a product uses an alternate INCI name, abbreviation, or common synonym. The planned Synonym Mapper addresses this directly:
- A many-to-one alias system maps every known name for a compound to a single canonical allergen entry (e.g., “Ascorbic Acid,” “L-Ascorbic Acid,” and “Vitamin C” all resolve to the same allergen record).
- Users profile their allergy once; the engine catches every surface form on a label automatically.
- This transforms the product from a simple string checker into an intelligent ingredient safety tool that handles real-world label variability.
Additional planned features
- Product ingredient input form with full POST handling and result display
- User management pages (profile view, edit, list)
- Image/OCR ingredient capture — photograph a product label instead of typing
- Barcode scanning integration for automatic ingredient lookup
Known Limitations
- Text input only (MVP): Ingredients must be manually pasted or typed; image and barcode input are not yet supported.
- Alias matching not yet implemented: Until the Synonym Mapper ships, a product listing “Ascorbic Acid” will not match a profile entry saved as “Vitamin C.” Users should be aware that alternate ingredient names may not be caught in the current version.
- Catalog scope: The allergen catalog covers common skincare-relevant allergens. Highly niche or regional ingredients may not appear in the current catalog.
- No medical validation: Severity levels and confirmation status are user-reported and are not verified by a medical professional through this tool.