Which Face Moisturisers Score Best on Yuka?

Four of the sixteen face moisturisers in the table below read 100 out of 100. The lowest reads 33. Both ends of that range are in the table below, because a ranking that stops at the good news is a catalogue, not a ranking.

Sixteen products, every score published on this site against a specific formulation, sorted high to low. Then the part that matters more than the order: what the gap between 100 and 33 is actually made of, and how much of it survives contact with European cosmetics law.

Sixteen Face Moisturisers, Ranked by Their Yuka Reading

Two things are missing from that table and both are worth admitting. We do not hold a reading for a Cetaphil moisturiser, only for its Gentle Skin Cleanser, which reads 100. And the table is our shelf rather than the market's: sixteen products is a sample, and we have gone deeper on some brands than on others.

The Gap Is Almost Entirely One Decision

Line the sixteen up and the pattern is not subtle. What separates the top of this table from the bottom is which preservative system the manufacturer picked, and after that, how many structural ingredients the texture needs.

The three creams at the bottom are all preserved on phenoxyethanol. Yuka rates it moderate risk, and a single moderate-risk ingredient holds a product below 50 no matter what else is in the jar. That one choice is the difference between 39 and a number in the nineties for CeraVe's lotion, and everything else on its flag list is decoration.

Typology's cream is preserved on potassium sorbate with sodium benzoate instead, and reads 100. Vanicream's is built without phenoxyethanol as well. Neither is a more advanced formula than CeraVe's. They made a different call about how to stop the bottle growing bacteria, and the app rewards the call rather than the outcome.

Below that, the second variable is count. Medicube's PDRN Pink Collagen Capsule Cream contains nothing Yuka rates above low risk, and still lands at 58, because six separate texture and stability agents each take a bite. Suspending visible capsules in a clear gel needs a gel former, a film former and an antifoam that an ordinary cream does without. The peptides it is sold on are not flagged at all.

What European Law Says About Each of Those Ingredients

An app's risk rating and a regulator's restriction are different claims, and conflating them is how a shopper ends up frightened of a thickener. We ran every ingredient class in the paragraphs above through CosIng, the European Commission's own database of cosmetic substances and the machine-readable form of the annexes to Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. Lookups taken 15 September 2026.

"No entry in any annex" is a precise claim and we mean it narrowly. The Commission holds a record for each of those six substances describing what it does, and none of them appears in Annexes II to VI, the parts of the regulation that ban a substance, cap its concentration or attach a labelling condition. The Commission has looked and imposed nothing.

Where our lookup returns nothing for a substance we would expect to be restricted, we say that rather than printing a limit. Potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate are the preservatives doing the work in the Typology cream, and CosIng indexes them under their parent acids rather than their salt names, so our exact-name search came back empty for both. We are not going to convert an empty search result into a regulatory statement in either direction.

The Commission attaches its own caveat to all of this and we carry it verbatim: the inclusion of an ingredient in the CosIng inventory is not an indication of authorisation, and only the Cosmetics Regulation itself has legal value in that respect.

So the regulatory scoreboard for this category comes out lopsided. One preservative with a 1% ceiling. Two parabens with tight caps, neither of which appears in any moisturiser on our table, though the same brand's Renewing SA Cream contains both and reads 0. And six structural ingredients that European regulators have declined to restrict at all, which between them account for most of the points lost across the bottom half of the ranking.

Which of These Is Right for Your Skin

Score first is the wrong order for this category. Texture and skin type decide whether you will actually use the thing every night, and an unused 100 is worth less than a 39 you like.

Dry or barrier-damaged skin. Embryolisse Lait-Crème Sensitive at 100 is the rich option, and it has been a backstage staple for decades for a reason. Vanicream Daily Facial Moisturizer, also 100, is the ceramide-led one and the closest like-for-like replacement if you are leaving CeraVe.

Oily, congested or blemish-prone skin. SVR Sebiaclear Mat+ at 86 is built for exactly this and is the only mattifying cream we hold a reading for. If you have oily skin and already own the CeraVe PM lotion, note that its oil-free texture is genuinely hard to match in this table, which is part of why people stay with it despite the 39.

Reactive or redness-prone skin. SVR Sensifine AR Cream at 93 is the specialist here, and La Roche-Posay Toleriane Double Repair at 100 is the pharmacy-brand generalist. Between them, the seven points are not the deciding factor. Whether your skin tolerates the formula is.

Avoiding fragrance. Vanicream and the Toleriane are both sold fragrance-free, and Medicube's capsule cream declares none either, despite its 58. If fragrance is your specific concern, read the declared list rather than the score, because a product can score badly for reasons that have nothing to do with perfume.

Anti-ageing at a low price. Three of the four creams at 79 are anti-ageing day or night creams, and none of them is expensive. At that score the flags are texture ingredients rather than anything a regulator has acted on. Facetheory's Peptide Firming Night Cream is the one of them with the most substantial active list.

Our Verdict on the Table

If you want the highest-scoring face moisturiser on this site and you have no strong texture preference, buy the Vanicream or the Toleriane. Both read 100, both are ceramide-led, both sit at pharmacy prices, and neither asks you to give anything up relative to what you were probably using.

If you are currently using a CeraVe moisturiser and the score is the only thing that bothers you, the switch is cheap and you may as well make it. If the score is not the only thing bothering you and the product has worked for a year, keep it. The full argument about that range, including where Yuka is right and where it is overstating, is in why CeraVe scores so low on Yuka.

And if you take one thing from the ranking, take this. In face moisturisers the Yuka score is mostly a preservative report. It is a useful one. It is just much narrower than the number makes it look.

The cross-category version of this table, covering every product on the site that reads a perfect score, is in which products actually score 100/100 on Yuka.