The Skinventry Edit

Editorial Standards

How we research, source, fact-check, and review every post. The standards a reader, a dermatologist, or a search engine should hold us to.

Why this page exists

Skincare is a Your Money or Your Life topic. Bad information can mean a damaged barrier, a bad reaction, money spent on a product that does the opposite of what it claims. This page documents how every piece of writing on The Skinventry Edit gets to publication. If you read something on this site that doesn't meet these standards, write us at edit@skinventry.com and we'll correct or retract it.

Our principles

Primary sources first.

Peer-reviewed dermatology journals (JAAD, JID, Dermatologic Surgery, JEADV), PubMed-indexed clinical trials, FDA labeling guidance, and statements from board-certified dermatologists rank above secondary sources. Generic skincare blogs and brand marketing copy are not sources.

Specific over vague.

Numbers with citations, mechanisms with references, dosages with study contexts. "Niacinamide reduces transepidermal water loss" earns its place only with the percentage, the concentration, the duration, and a link to the trial.

Pushback on consensus.

Skincare carries persistent myths. Pores don't open and close. The two-minute wait between steps is invented. Non-comedogenic was tested on rabbits. We write the version of skincare advice that survives a working dermatologist reading it.

Nuance over universality.

Skin-of-color variation, age variation, condition variation. Where evidence differs by population, we say so.

Honest about uncertainty.

If something is debated, we say so. If a study is small or recent, we say so. If a claim is mechanistic but unproven in vivo, we say so.

The editorial workflow

Every post on The Skinventry Edit passes through six stages before it goes live. We modeled this on the multi-agent debate work coming out of academic AI research and the constitutional critique loops used by frontier AI labs.

1. Research and draft

An angle is chosen that no existing post on the site covers. Primary sources are pulled. A draft is written that includes inline citations, statistics with named studies, at least one direct quotation from a named dermatologist or researcher, and a Frequently Asked Questions block answering the questions a reader would actually ask.

2. Adversarial critique

The draft is re-read by a hostile editor whose job is to find weaknesses. Every empirical claim is interrogated for hallucination risk. Every section is checked for the sort of pushback a working dermatologist would give in a comment thread. Marketing-tone bleed is flagged. Missing nuance is flagged.

3. Fact-check

Every empirical claim in the draft is independently verified against its cited source. The cited paper or guideline is read to confirm it actually says what the draft attributes to it. Claims that fail verification are corrected or removed before publication. We do not publish a post containing a claim we cannot stand behind.

4. Quality lint

A deterministic check runs the draft against our structural rules: word count, citation count, statistic count, internal-link count, FAQ block presence, banned-phrase absence, em-dash absence, title format. Failures generate a concrete fix list.

5. Revise

The draft is revised against the critique, the fact-check corrections, and the lint fixes. The voice and structure of the original draft are preserved. Edits are surgical and limited to identified issues.

6. Final judgment

The revised post is re-read holistically. Every claim sourced. The FAQ section actually answers questions a reader would ask. The TL;DR delivers a conclusion-first answer. The post is comfortable in front of a board-certified dermatologist. If any of these fail, the post returns to step 5. The maximum is two revision loops; if a post still fails after that, it does not publish.

What this is not

The Skinventry Edit is editorial, not medical advice. Nothing here replaces a consultation with a board-certified dermatologist who can examine your skin and review your history. If you have a skin condition, see a derm. We are writing the version of skincare information that we wish existed when we were trying to learn what was true.

Corrections policy

If a published post contains an error, we correct it inline and add a note at the bottom of the post indicating what was changed and when. Significant corrections to YMYL claims are surfaced in the post header. We update post dateModified and lastReviewed schema fields when material edits are made.

The team

The Skinventry Edit is published by Skinventry, the iOS skincare intelligence app. Posts are bylined "The Skinventry Edit" because they are the product of the workflow above rather than a single author's view. Editorial inquiries: edit@skinventry.com.

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