The front of a skincare box is written by the people selling it. "Clinically proven", "dermatologist recommended" and "visibly plumper in 7 days" all sound like evidence, but none of them tells you whether the experts who test products for a living actually liked this one. The good news is that the answer usually exists already, spoken out loud in somebody's video. Here is how to find it in the time it takes to queue for the till.
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that trips up the most shoppers. A single brand name can cover a cream, a lotion, a gel and a "rich" version, each with its own formula. The experts often have quite different views on each, so a glowing take about the cream tells you very little about the lotion sitting next to it.
The quickest way to be sure is to match the full name on the front of the pack, including words like "rich", "oil free" or "SPF 30". If a product page shows a different size or packaging to the one in your hand, that is usually fine. A different name is not.
The Guru Score is our read on how warmly the experts who reviewed a product talk about it, shown as a percentage. It only counts gurus who actually talked about that product, and each one counts once however often they bring it up.
As a rough guide, a Guru Score of 75% or more means the experts who weighed in mostly say yes. Between about 55% and 75% they are divided or have real reservations, which is worth a closer look rather than a pass. Lower than that, they lean against it.
The number of experts behind the score matters as much as the score itself. A Guru Score of 90% from two gurus is a promising start. The same score from twenty is about as sure as this gets.
The score tells you how the room leans. The takes underneath tell you whether that lean applies to you. A moisturizer can lose points because a few experts found it too heavy for oily skin, which is exactly what someone with dry skin wants to hear. Another can lose points for fragrance, which matters a great deal for sensitive skin and hardly at all for everyone else.
So read the nays first. They are usually short and specific, and they are where the useful warnings live.
Plenty of skincare reviews are sponsored, and that is not automatically a problem. However, it is worth knowing. On The Guru Index every take that came from a paid video is flagged Sponsored, and a product whose takes are mostly paid carries a note saying so. No brand can pay for a better Guru Score. For the full picture, see what our data shows about sponsored reviews.
You can do every check above on the website: search the product, open its page, and scroll to the takes. On a phone in a busy shop, though, typing out a long product name is the slow part.
That is what The Guru Index app is for. It is free on iPhone. Point it at the front of the pack and it reads the label for you, finds the product and shows its Guru Score with every take behind it, each one quoted and attributed to the expert who said it. You can also save things to a wish list for later. Get it on the App Store.
If the app does not find a match, it shows the best-scored products we do hold on the same shelf, plus what we hold from that brand, so you still leave with something to compare against. A product usually goes missing for one simple reason: not enough of our experts have reviewed it yet.