Reva/About
made in australia
The beauty internet got scared of chemistry.
Reva is a calm, dose-aware answer to the apps that flag your sunscreen as poison. We read the concentration, the evidence and the actual Australian rules, and we show our working.
made where the light is unforgiving
It started with a Cancer Council SPF 50 flagged as "toxic" by a hazard-scanning app, on a continent where two in three people are diagnosed with skin cancer by the age of seventy. The score was not just wrong. It was dangerous, because the thing it warned you off is the single most protective product on an Australian shelf. Daily sunscreen cut invasive melanoma by 73% in the Nambour trial. An app that scares you away from it is not on your side.
The hazard scanners share one broken idea: that a chemical is either "clean" or "toxic," and a red badge settles it. But the people who actually study this stopped believing that in 1538, when Paracelsus wrote that the dose makes the poison. Water is toxic at the right dose. Retinol is a prescription medicine above 1% and a gentle serum below it. A verdict that ignores how much is in the bottle is not science, it is theatre.
A hazard at 100% is not a hazard at 0.1%. Refusing to say which one you are looking at is the whole trick.
Shoppers have noticed, and so have the scientists. Cosmetic scientists and toxicologists fault the loudest hazard scanners, EWG's Skin Deep among them, for scoring a chemical's hazard in isolation and ignoring the dose that actually reaches your skin - in one survey, most toxicologists said the group overstates chemical risk. Six in ten of us read the ingredient list before we buy, and for a third of Australian women full ingredient transparency is a leading driver of brand trust, second only to price. The appetite is not for another scary number. It is for someone to tell the truth, and prove it.
So Reva measures every ingredient against a Margin of Safety, the same threshold the European SCCS and the US CIR use to clear a substance: the dose known to cause harm, divided by the dose your skin actually absorbs. Clear a hundred-fold margin and it is cleared. Where an ingredient is a genuine allergen, we flag it as something to weigh, not as poison. And where the evidence runs out, we say so and hold the score, instead of inventing a green.
We built it in Australia, on the AICIS inventory and the TGA schedules, because the rules here are genuinely different and no global app models them. And we built it to reach out calmly, once, when something you own is truly recalled or reassessed, rather than to farm your anxiety and sell it back to brands.
what we won't bend
Four rules we hold to.
01 The dose comes first
We read the concentration, or we hold the score. Because an ingredient list is ordered by weight down to 1%, we can infer roughly how much of each active is really there, and a hazard at full strength is not a hazard at a trace.
02 Evidence over anxiety
Every mark carries a citation you can open, measured against a Margin of Safety of 100, the same bar the SCCS and CIR use to clear an ingredient. We describe, we do not sell. A finding is not a verdict.
03 Australia is not a footnote
Here a sunscreen is a therapeutic good at SPF 4, retinol is prescription-only above 1%, and the TGA schedules are their own document. We model them as data, not as EU rules with an exception noted at the bottom.
04 Doubt gets said out loud
When coverage of a formula falls below a third, we say "not enough data" and hold the score. The absence of a detected hazard is never read as proof that a product is safe. Every refusal is logged in public.
Respect the dose.
Respect the rules.
Respect you.
the whole company, in six words
Read a label the honest way.
The app is free to download, the web checker is free to read, and there's an API when you're ready to build on the same graph.