How we decide what to tell you

Every safety verdict on this site comes from the same short process. It is written down here so you can judge the answers rather than trust them.

Where the answers come from

We do not write verdicts page by page. Each condition group — pregnancy, cancer treatment, heart and circulation, skin, infections, autoimmune conditions, eyes, nails, general health, and the rarer situations — has a written safety audit behind it. An audit reads the published guidance for that group and turns it into numbered rules: what a rule applies to, what it says, and which source it came from.

Those rules are then applied to every treatment on the site by a program, not by hand. That is deliberate. A person writing 88 treatment pages one at a time will eventually contradict themselves; a rule applied 88 times cannot. It also means that when a rule changes, every page that depended on it changes with it, on the same day.

How a single verdict is settled

A treatment can be caught by more than one rule at once — a rule about your condition, a rule about your medication, a rule about the stage you are at. When that happens the most restrictive of them wins. If one rule says caution and another says avoid, you will see avoid.

Genuine exceptions are written as their own, narrower rules and are checked first, so that "avoid, unless it is over an unaffected area" reads as the exception it is rather than being flattened into a blanket no. Where an answer is only true over the affected area, the page says so, because "not on your leg" and "not at all" are very different pieces of advice.

Occasionally a verdict is set by hand, because the audit says something a rule cannot express. Those are marked as reviewed by hand on the page, and re-running the rules never quietly overwrites them.

Which sources we cite

On a public page we cite tier 1 sources only: national health services and their guideline bodies, medicines regulators, medical royal colleges and specialist associations, national patient charities, and peer-reviewed journals. In practice that means the NHS, NICE, the MHRA, UKHSA, the British Association of Dermatologists, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, UKTIS, Macmillan, and their equivalents elsewhere.

We do not cite clinic marketing, treatment-provider blogs, magazines, trade press or manufacturer claims as evidence for a safety verdict. Where something like that is the only thing we can find, it stays in our own records as a note about where a claim came from, and it never becomes a verdict you can see.

Every verdict on the site carries its source next to it. If a claim has no source you can click, we consider that a fault, not a style.

What happens when we do not know

This is the part most sites skip. When our sources do not answer a question — or answer it too vaguely to be useful — we leave it blank and say so on the page. You will see "not yet reviewed" rather than a green tick, and "under review" where we have a draft answer that has not been signed off yet.

We would rather show you nothing than something we cannot stand behind. An invented verdict on a page about your pregnancy or your cancer treatment is worse than an admission that we do not know, so nothing on this site is filled in to look finished.

Pages that are held back on purpose

Pages about treatment for cancer do not show safety ratings yet. They carry the background reading and the sources we used, and a notice explaining why the ratings are missing. They stay that way until a medical reviewer with the right clinical background has signed them off. That is a decision about the stakes of getting oncology wrong, not about how finished the writing is.

We are currently looking for that reviewer. When one is appointed, their name and credentials will appear on the pages they have checked, and the ratings on those pages will be turned on.

Pages that are still being written are marked as such and are kept out of search results until they are done.

Dates, updates and corrections

The "last updated" date on a page is the date its content actually changed. It does not move because the site was rebuilt, and we do not refresh dates to look current.

If you think something here is wrong, out of date, or dangerously oversimplified, please tell us. Corrections to a safety verdict are traced back to the rule and the source behind them, which means a single correction usually fixes every page that shared the same mistake. When we change a verdict in a way that would alter what a reader should do, we say so on the page rather than editing it silently.

What this site is not

It is information, not personal medical advice, and it cannot know your history. It does not recommend salons, does not accept payment for a verdict, and does not carry advertising or affiliate links. Photographs on safety pages are our own; we do not use stock or AI-generated imagery where a picture might be read as evidence. The decorative illustrations on the home page and on the aftercare, ingredients and guides hubs are AI-generated — they are signposts, not pictures of treatments, and they never appear on a page that carries a verdict.