This is long overdue, but I finally got around to compiling an ingredient database for every product I’ve ever written about on My Dad the Chemist. I decided to use Airtable to get the job done—if you haven’t heard of it, it’s like an aesthetically pleasing Excel spreadsheet that you can query like a database (no SQL knowledge required).

Without further ado, here’s the Airtable base, which I’ll keep updating as I continue to write about new products on My Dad the Chemist.

Some considerations

Note that the last column (SPF) is only applicable to sunscreen. The second-to-last column (Active ingredient percentages) is usually also only applicable to sunscreen, but occasionally, is also for healing products (e.g., certain eczema lotions list colloidal oatmeal as an active ingredient).

Tips for using this ingredient database

I can’t believe that, at the time of publication, I’ve already written about 81 products on My Dad the Chemist. But there’s no need to scroll through them all (unless you want to, of course). You can use the Filter option at the top to narrow down the list to products from a certain company, products that contain a certain ingredient, or products from a certain category (e.g., hair care).

Here’s an example of how you might filter for rows of products that contain “niacinamide” in the Ingredients column:

Screen Recording 2018-08-05 at 10.15 PM.mov

If you’re interested in reading more about a product, scroll over to the “Link to blog post” column and click on the link to read the review.

You can also use the Sort option to sort rows alphabetically by any column value, or the Group option to group by any value, like Company (as shown below).

Screen Recording 2018-08-05 at 10.40 PM.mov