Compare
smarter.Not harder, not louder.
Two serums can carry the same active and a $154 price gap. Skin Switch puts any two skincare products side by side and reads the labels for you — what matches, what differs, which ingredients are doing the work, and which ones tend to cause trouble. Every term explained in plain English.
- Products
- 19
- Ingredients decoded
- 121
- Categories
- 8
Start a comparison
Paula's Choice
10% Niacinamide Booster
$46.00 · 20 ml
The Ordinary
Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%
$6.50 · 30 ml
No account, no quiz, no email. Results are instant.
SAMPLE DATAIngredient lists here are abridged transcriptions of real retail formulas, held for demonstration. Brands reformulate without renaming — always read the carton you are holding.
What Skin Switch does
A label reader that
isn't selling you anything
Skincare marketing is built to make comparison hard. Two products with nearly identical formulas get different names, different stories and wildly different prices, and the only place the truth is written down is the ingredient list — in Latin, in six-point type, on the part of the box you throw away.
Skin Switch reads that list. It tells you which ingredients two products share, which ones only one of them has, what each one actually does, and whether anything in there is a common trigger. Then — and only then — it tells you which one it would pick, and shows the reasoning so you can disagree with it.
Steps
Three
Pick two products, read the breakdown, decide.
Bias
None
No affiliate links, no sponsored placements, no brand partnerships.
Order
Facts first
The recommendation comes after the evidence, never before it.
01Ingredient comparison
See the overlap, not the story
Both lists get normalised and lined up. Shared ingredients are grouped together, the ones unique to each product are split out, and an overlap score tells you at a glance whether you are looking at two takes on the same formula or two genuinely different products.
Compare two productsPaula's Choice 10% Niacinamide BoostervsThe Ordinary Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%
14%
Shared
4
Only A
15
Only B
9
Price gap: $39.50 (86%)
02Ingredient explanations
Every Latin name, in plain English
Tap any ingredient and you get what it is, what job it does in that formula, and whether its position in the list means it is present at a level that matters. Fatty alcohols get separated from drying alcohol. Silicones get defended. Fragrance gets flagged.
Read a full breakdownVitamin B3. One of the best-evidenced all-rounders: it supports the barrier, tempers oil, and fades post-blemish marks over 8–12 weeks.
A fatty alcohol. Thickens and softens — the opposite of drying alcohol, despite the shared name.
Fragrance. A blend that does not have to be broken out on the label, so you cannot tell which components are in it.
03Recommendations
A verdict you can argue with
Skin Switch will tell you which product to buy — but it puts that at the very bottom of the page, after the ingredient lists, the actives, the irritants and the skin-type table. It shows its reasoning as a numbered list, and it is explicit about the things a label simply cannot tell you.
See a worked verdictVerdict · shown last
The Ordinary Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% is the better default here.
- 01Same job, different routes: only 14% of the two lists match, so these will feel and behave differently even though the category is identical.
- 02The headline actives are shared: Niacinamide. Running both means doubling up on the same ingredient.
And what it cannot say: Texture, finish and how a product wears under makeup or sunscreen are not something a list can tell you.
04Dupe Finder
The same formula, quietly cheaper
Point the Dupe Finder at something expensive and it scores every cheaper product in that category — weighting active ingredients at 65% and the rest of the list at 35%. You get the match score, the saving, and an honest account of what you lose. When there is no real dupe, it says so.
Open the Dupe FinderReplacing
SK-II Facial Treatment Essence
$185.00
Best match
Missha Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence
$34.00
Match score
69%
You save
$151.00
82% less
Saccharomyces Ferment Filtrate stands in for Galactomyces Ferment Filtrate — a different molecule in the same class, which is why this counts.
Stop paying for the part of the bottle you can't see.
Two products, one page, no marketing. Pick the pair you have been going back and forth on.