Actives glossary
Cholesterol
The barrier lipid with the worst name for marketing and a necessary place in the mixture.
- INCI name
- Cholesterol
- Also called
- Nothing else in common use
- Family
- Lipid
- Range seen on labels
- Rarely published
- Sits well with
- ceramides, fatty-acids
- Needs care with
- No common conflict note
Cholesterol is one of the three lipid classes that make up the skin’s barrier, alongside ceramides and free fatty acids. It rarely gets front-of-box treatment, for reasons that have more to do with the word than the molecule.
Why it matters to a formula
In the barrier repair work, mixtures that are incomplete or badly proportioned perform worse than balanced ones. Cholesterol is part of what makes a mixture complete. A cream that names ceramides and nothing else has either left it out or chosen not to say.
What to look for on a label
Cholesterol appears plainly as “Cholesterol” on an INCI list. Its presence does not tell you the proportion, which no brand in our barrier ranking publishes, but its absence tells you the mixture is not the one the literature describes.