Editorial policy

Independence

• No brand has paid for a placement here, and none will. There is no sponsored content on this site and no arrangement under which there could be.
• We accept no free products. That is easy for us to say honestly, because we do not test products at all - but it also means no maker has a relationship with us to lean on.
• Affiliate links do not affect the order of picks. The order is computed from four published axes and the working is printed under every score. Where we recommend something we earn nothing on, the page says so explicitly.
• We link things we earn nothing from when they are the right answer - brand-direct soaps, specialist retailers, and in one case a product we tell you to buy somewhere we have no relationship with.

Claims that are banned on this site

These are absolute. If any of them appears on a page, it is an error and we want to know.

• “We tested”, “hands-on”, hours-of-testing counts, owned-unit claims. We have tested nothing.
• Credentials. No expert, specialist, veteran, seasoned, long-time, X-years, barber, dermatologist, “medically reviewed by”, or expert panel.
• Fabricated prices, ratings, review counts or product claims. Prices come from a live layer or the page says “Check price”.
• An assumption presented as a measurement. Every assumed figure is labeled at the point of use.
• A specification we cannot cite. Where a maker publishes nothing, the page says “not published”.
• Medical advice. Nothing here is medical advice, and pages touching skin conditions say so and point at a doctor.

Refresh cadence

Years in titles

We do not put a year in a page title unless the page has been refreshed into that year. A year in a title creates an obligation, and the category is full of pages published in one year and titled for another - we found a shaving soap roundup published in 2021 and titled for 2023, never updated in between. Either we refresh into the year or we do not claim it.

Corrections

A correction to a specification gets fixed and gets a dated note on the page. We do not silently edit a number and pretend it was always right, because the entire proposition of this site is that the figures are checkable, and a checkable figure that changes without acknowledgement is worse than one that was never checkable.

Reader-reported specification errors go to the top of the list. Send them here.

Changes to the scoring

The four axes and their weights are published on the methodology page. If a weight or a breakpoint changes, that page changes in the same commit, so it can never describe a system the site is not actually running. That is a rule enforced in the code comments as well as here.

Gaps we publish rather than fill

Two visible examples, both deliberate:

• The electric section ships with one guide instead of three. The keyword research supported one genuinely distinct guide question that was not already better answered elsewhere on the site. Padding it with two invented guides would have been worse than saying so.
• Hair and Body are reserved rather than filled. They are real pages that say what they will cover and point at the closest existing content, because moving URLs later is worse than planning for them now.

There is also a third, less visible: there are no product photographs on this site. Product imagery on an affiliate site may only come from the retailer's own API, and those credentials were empty when this build ran. A gray placeholder box would have been worse than the specification table that is there instead.

On how this is written

Every page is checked against its cited sources before publication, and every specification on the site links the page it came from. The standard we hold is not how a page was drafted; it is whether every factual claim on it can be traced to a source you can open in another tab. Where a claim cannot be traced, it does not appear - “not published” is used instead, and it appears often.