Your Own Sensitivity Profile: Skin Type, Life Stage and 12 Avoidance Categories | CosmeticLens

The short answer

Yes — in CosmeticLens the sensitivity profile is yours from day one and stays free no matter what you subscribe to. It holds your skin type, your life stage, and any number of the 12 avoidance categories — fragrance, preservative, alcohol, acid, retinol, essential oil, sulfate, silicone, colorant, PEG, paraben and salicylic acid — and every scan is matched against it as the results stream in. What is limited on the free tier is the reading itself: one label reading for the life of the install, after which the shutter locks until you subscribe. The profile is never behind that gate, because a filter you need in order to interpret a result cannot reasonably be the thing being sold.

Why you are really asking whether the profile is for sale

The question behind "is my sensitivity profile paywalled" is almost never about money. It is about who owns the thing that knows your skin.

A profile like this is close to a medical intake form: skin type, life stage, and the ingredients you react to. The failure mode people are really checking for is the one where a profile is stored on a server, used to personalise ads or recommendations, or handed to a third party — the ordinary bargain of a free beauty app. The second thing people are checking is the subscription trap: a free scan or two, then a paywall that appears only once you have already built a profile and switched your habits to it.

CosmeticLens takes the position that neither is acceptable. The profile is local, the inference is the only network call, and the paywall sits on repetition rather than on personalisation.

What is actually in the profile

Four things, and they do different jobs:

• Skin type — dry, oily, combination, sensitive or normal.
• Life stage — normal, preconception, early pregnancy (weeks 1–13), mid pregnancy (14–27), late pregnancy (28+) or lactation.
• Up to 12 avoidance categories, each set to a severity of caution, avoid or allergic. "Allergic" is for a category you have had a real reaction to, not a theoretical one, and each entry can carry a short private note — "this brand's toner made my cheeks sting" — that stays with the profile.
• Setup history — whether you finished onboarding, which is what the app uses to know your profile is complete rather than half-filled.

Two quick templates get you started: Sensitive Skin selects fragrance, preservative, alcohol and essential oil; Pregnancy selects retinol, salicylic acid, acid and essential oil and sets the stage to mid-pregnancy. Custom clears the list and lets you pick. Tapping any individual category after a template switches you to Custom rather than silently overriding the template.

How matching actually works

This is the part most competitor pages skip, and it is not a red/yellow/green badge. There are two separate things happening, and they come from different rules:

1. Profile match. Every ingredient the reader identifies is assigned one of the 12 categories (or none). If that category is in your avoid list, the ingredient is flagged and appears under Matched · Avoid List, carrying the severity you gave the category.

2. Unmatched risk. Anything not in your profile that still comes back at medium risk or above appears under Of Note · Mid-High Risk. So your profile filters the noise, but it does not blind you to something you did not think to avoid.

Above both, three derived sections use your profile context rather than your avoid list:

• Pregnancy — shown only when your life stage is pregnancy-related. Retinol in the list yields Best avoided; salicylic acid or essential oil yields Use with caution; neither yields No flagged ingredients, which is a statement about what was detected, not a declaration that the product is safe.
• For your skin — three fixed rules. Dry skin raises May feel drying when alcohol or sulfates are present; sensitive skin raises Sensitive skin may react for fragrance, alcohol, essential oil or colorant; oily skin raises May feel heavy on oily skin for silicone or PEG. Combination and normal skin get nothing here by design — there is no single honest rule for a face that behaves differently by zone, so the app stays quiet rather than guessing.
• Flagged groups — the risk categories grouped by type regardless of whether you avoid them, and Active highlights — recognisable actives (niacinamide, ceramides, hyaluronic acid, peptides and similar) grouped by benefit.

One more thing worth knowing: your avoid categories, skin type and life stage are sent to the model as part of the scan request, because that is what lets it read and classify the label in the context you care about. The profile itself is not kept on any server.

The pregnancy stage, specifically

Because it is the case people ask about most, here is exactly what it does and does not do.

Selecting any pregnancy-related stage during setup automatically adds retinol, salicylic acid and acids to your avoid list, and the setup screen says so rather than doing it silently. From that point, any scan shows you the pregnancy line with one of three labels based on what was detected. The stage is also what makes the whole line appear at all: if your life stage is normal, the section is simply not rendered, because a pregnancy verdict shown to someone who is not pregnant is noise at best and false reassurance at worst.

What it is not: a clearance. It reads categories from a printed list, it has no access to concentration beyond list order, and it does not know about derived forms of an ingredient that are not printed. Its own wording on the result is This is an AI vision report, not a medical or safety conclusion. Ingredient risks vary by person, concentration, and use. For a pregnancy or a real skin condition, the app says plainly: treat a scan as an extra check, never the only one, and ask a dermatologist or pharmacist when in doubt. CosmeticLens asks you to acknowledge that boundary once during setup, before it will show you a result.

What CosmeticLens does differently — and its honest limits

The half it does well: the profile is free, complete and editable, with real severity levels and notes rather than a binary "sensitive skin" toggle. It is stored locally with your scan history; no ads, no data selling, optional anonymous analytics only. Privacy is handled concretely rather than promised: the label image is sent over an encrypted channel for inference and is not stored after the request completes.

The half it does not: a category match is not a percentage. "Fragrance at position 3" and "fragrance at position 30" are both flagged identically; concentration is inferred from list order, not measured. The 12 categories are a fixed vocabulary — an ingredient that belongs to none of them is not flagged against your profile even if it is one you avoid. The skin and pregnancy rules are three and one respectively, not clinical models. And the free tier is genuinely thin: one reading, ever, which means the product cannot be evaluated at all on the free tier unless you already know which bottle you will scan. CosmeticLens Pro is $4.99/month or $29.99/year in the USA, with a 7-day free trial on the yearly plan for new subscribers and none on the monthly plan, and it removes the limit entirely. The profile behind those unlimited readings stays exactly where it was.

The decision you can now make

If what you want is to keep a private record of what your skin reacts to and have every future scan filtered against it, this is a profile you build once, keep, and are not charged for. If what you want is pregnancy clearance or a sensitivity diagnosis, no app reading a printed label can give you that, and this one tells you so at every step.

Either way, hold it to the same bar: use the scan to understand the list quickly, then read the physical label before you use the product. If that is the job, CosmeticLens is on the App Store — its full feature list and privacy terms are on the product page, or start with how it reads a label with no barcode and what it will never claim for you.