Does Medicube's Zero Pore Mud Mask Hold Up on Yuka?

Yuka reads the Medicube Zero Pore Blackhead Mud Mask at 80 out of 100, which puts it in the app's Excellent band. We took the reading in the Yuka app on 7 September 2026, where the product is listed as "Zero Pore Blackhead Mud Mask". Four ingredients are flagged. Forty-six come back risk-free.

That is an odd result for a clay mask whose selling point is chemical exfoliation and whose ingredient list opens with kaolin, bentonite and a run of citrus oils. Products built like this usually lose more. Understanding why this one does not tells you more about Yuka than it does about Medicube.

The Four Flags, and How Hard They Land

Every one of the four is marked Low risk. That is the mildest category the app applies, and it is the only category present here.

• Salicylic acid, low risk. The exfoliating acid the mask is sold on, flagged at the gentlest level Yuka has.
• Limonene, low risk. It appears in the list in its own right, at the very end, which is where a declared fragrance component usually sits.
• Citrus Limon (Lemon) Peel Oil, low risk.
• Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Peel Oil, low risk. Ninth and tenth on the ingredient list, just after the bergamot oil that Yuka does not flag.

We checked the arithmetic against a published INCI list rather than trusting the reading on its own. The mask's full declared list runs to fifty ingredients. Yuka's four flagged plus forty-six risk-free is fifty. Those two numbers agreeing exactly is worth saying out loud, because in the same batch of five Medicube readings, two of them did not agree.

Nothing in this formula is rated moderate or high risk. On Yuka's published scale, a single orange ingredient would cap the mask below 50 and a single red one below 25. Neither exists here, so the twenty missing points come entirely from how many yellow flags the formula carries, not from anything the app considers genuinely worrying.

What European Law Actually Restricts

Yuka gives you a number. We think the more useful question is which of these ingredients a regulator has ever put a condition on, so we ran all four through our own CosIng lookup on 14 September 2026. CosIng is the European Commission's own database of cosmetic substances, and it is the machine-readable form of the annexes to Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009.

One of the four returned an annex entry. One.

Limonene holds entry 88 in Annex III, the annex for substances that may be used subject to restrictions. Its entry states no maximum concentration at all. What it requires instead, in the Commission's own wording, is that "the presence of the substance shall be indicated in the list of ingredients" once it exceeds 0.001% in a leave-on product or 0.01% in a rinse-off one, and that the peroxide value of the substance stays below 20 mmoles per litre. That is a labelling duty and a quality condition on the raw material. It is not a limit on how much of it a mask may contain.

The other three returned nothing in any annex. Salicylic acid has a CosIng inventory record, which lists its declared functions as keratolytic, anti-seborrheic, preservative, skin conditioning, hair conditioning and fragrance, but our name-exact lookup matched no entry in the restrictive annexes. We are not going to print a concentration limit we did not read, so we make no claim about its restriction status here. The two citrus oils returned the same result: inventory records with fragrance and skin-conditioning functions, and no annex entry.

So of the four ingredients costing this mask twenty points, European cosmetics law puts a named condition on exactly one, and the condition is that the word appears on the packaging.

Contact Time Is Missing From the Score

Here is the part the number cannot carry. This is a rinse-off product that sits on the face for ten or fifteen minutes and then goes down the sink.

The Regulation treats that as material. Limonene's own entry sets the declaration threshold ten times higher for a rinse-off product than for a leave-on one, which is the Commission saying, in the only language it has, that a few minutes of contact is not the same exposure as eight hours. Yuka's score makes no such distinction. The same four flags on an overnight cream would produce the same 80, and the real-world exposure would be completely different.

That cuts against the app when you are scanning a mask, and it cuts for the app when you are scanning a moisturiser. Either way, the number alone will not tell you which situation you are in.

Who This Is Still Fine For

• Oily and congestion-prone skin. A clay base with salicylic acid at a wash-off contact time is about as low-commitment as chemical exfoliation gets.
• Anyone who has used it for months without a reaction. The ingredients most likely to provoke one are the citrus oils, and that is a fast verdict on your own face rather than a slow one.
• People who want an acid without a daily habit. A mask used twice a week delivers a fraction of the exposure a leave-on toner does, and it is far harder to overdo.

Be more careful if you already know citrus oils irritate you, if your barrier is currently compromised, or if you are stacking this on top of a retinoid and an acid toner in the same week. The flags here are mild individually. Three actives in rotation on angry skin is not a mild situation.

If You Want a Higher Number

Being straight about the limits of our own coverage: we do not hold a clay mask that scores higher than this one. Everything below is a different job, not a like-for-like swap.

• Biodance Bio Collagen Real Deep Mask, 93/100. A hydrogel overnight mask with no acids and no essential oils. Thirteen points higher, and it does nothing at all for blackheads.
• Facetheory Glow-C Cream Cleanser, 96/100. If the mask is part of a deep-cleanse routine, this is the higher-scoring way to handle the cleanse half of it.
• Staying inside the brand, the Deep Vita C Pads read 64 and the original Zero Pore Pad reads 62. Both sit below the mask, so swapping within the Zero Pore line moves you down, not up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yuka score of the Medicube Zero Pore Blackhead Mud Mask?

80/100, in the Excellent band, read in the Yuka app on 7 September 2026. Four ingredients are flagged, all at low risk: salicylic acid, limonene, lemon peel oil and orange peel oil. Forty-six further ingredients come back risk-free.

Is the salicylic acid the reason it loses points?

It is one of four reasons, and all four weigh the same. Yuka marks it low risk, the same level it gives the orange oil. No single flag on this formula caps the score, which is why the mask still clears 75 and lands in the top band.

Does the mask contain anything restricted in the EU?

One ingredient carries an annex entry: limonene, under Annex III entry 88 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. That entry sets no maximum concentration. It requires the name to be declared above 0.001% in leave-on products and 0.01% in rinse-off products, and caps the raw material's peroxide value. Our lookup found no annex entry for the other three.

Our Verdict

Keep it. An 80 on Yuka for an exfoliating clay mask is a good result, the four things holding it back are the app's mildest category, and the one ingredient European law names is named for a labelling reason rather than a safety limit.

If the citrus oils bother you, that is a real preference and worth acting on. If you were about to drop the mask over a number in an app, the number is not telling you to. The rest of the brand's spread, including the products that score well below this one, is in our Medicube Yuka guide, and every score we hold for the brand sits on the Medicube hub.