01What this publication is
Ecomen Skin covers men's skin and grooming from a formulation and sustainability standpoint. That means we are more interested in what is in a product, what its label is legally allowed to claim and what happens to its container than in whether it feels luxurious.
The audience we write for is men who read labels: people who will happily spend money on something that works and object to spending it on a word. If you want a lifestyle publication, this will read as unnecessarily dry. That is the intention.
02The editorial position, in five statements
- Origin is not a proxy for anything. Plant derived does not mean gentle, safe or lower impact. Synthetic does not mean the opposite. Each has to be assessed separately.
- Regulation is more substantial than shoppers assume. UK cosmetics law carries restricted substance lists and requires a safety assessment for every product. Most scare marketing works by concealing this.
- Most claims are unregulated vocabulary. Clean, non toxic, hypoallergenic, reef safe and microbiome friendly have no legal definition in UK cosmetic law.
- The evidence is thinner than the marketing almost everywhere. A small number of ingredients carry real human evidence. We say which, and we say when we are describing a mechanism rather than a result.
- Buying less is the strongest environmental lever available. It is also the one nobody sells, which is why it appears in every packaging article we publish.
03How this is funded, stated plainly
There is no advertising network on this site and there never will be. Revenue comes from three declared places, and each is visible on the page where it applies.
A category sponsor slot. One sponsor at a time may be named on the index and in the newsletter. A sponsor buys visibility and nothing else. Sponsors do not see assessments before publication, cannot request changes, cannot appear in an article, and are labelled wherever they appear. A sponsor whose own category is being assessed is declined.
A labelled newsletter placement. One placement per issue, marked as a placement, separated from editorial by a rule and a label rather than by implication.
A declared affiliate layer. Where we have assessed a category against the published criteria, a link out to a stockist may carry an affiliate tag, and that is disclosed at the top of the page it appears on rather than in a footer. No affiliate arrangement is currently live, and when one is, the disclosure appears before the content rather than after it. Assessments are written before any commercial arrangement is considered, and an affiliate relationship never creates, changes or removes an assessment.
The full terms are on the sponsorship page, which is written to be read by prospective sponsors and by readers checking what we have agreed to.
04What we refuse to do
- We do not rank named brands. We have not tested named brands under controlled conditions, so publishing a ranking would be publishing an assessment we did not make. We assess categories against criteria instead, and we publish the criteria.
- We do not invent specifics. No study, author, journal, sample size, effect size, price, clinic, practitioner or review is fabricated anywhere on this site.
- We do not calculate footprints we cannot source. We describe what a manufacturer discloses and whether it is assessable. We do not publish figures we have not obtained.
- We do not accept samples in exchange for coverage, and we do not run sponsored articles or guest posts.
- We do not give medical advice. We describe what published guidance says and point to the bodies that publish it.
05Where our information comes from
We rely on institution level sources: the NHS, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the British Association of Dermatologists, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Advertising Standards Authority, the Cochrane Library, and UK government guidance on cosmetics, chemicals and packaging.
Where an evidence base is thin we say it is thin, rather than describing it in language borrowed from a stronger one. Where we describe a mechanism rather than a demonstrated outcome, we say which we are doing. The method is set out in how we assess.
06Commercial links, and the archive exception
Four articles in our archive each carry exactly one editorial link to a named organisation. Those links were placed editorially by our own writers, were never sold, and were not paid for, commissioned, requested or previewed by the organisations named. Each of those four pages carries a publisher disclosure block saying so, on the page itself.
Every other page on this site carries no commercial link of any kind, and says so in a block at the foot of the article. That is the complete position, and we would rather state it in full than leave it to a footer nobody reads.
07Who publishes this
Ecomen Skin is published by Northbank Media, which publishes a number of independent titles. Editorial decisions on this site are made by its own editors. The publisher does not sell coverage on this title, and no commercial relationship held elsewhere in the group creates coverage here.
If you think something on this site is wrong, we would rather know. Corrections are made on the page, with the change noted, rather than by quiet deletion. The route is the contact page.