A skin science map, not a product ranking.

Most people meet skincare through marketing — product claims, influencer reviews, ingredient buzzwords. The result is that even engaged users can struggle to answer simple questions like “why does this happen?” or “what does this ingredient actually do?”

SkinCortex starts from the other side. It models conditions as biological systems — sebum, microbes, immune response, barrier — and connects ingredients to the steps they engage. Every relationship carries an evidence level. SkinCortex does not recommend products and does not diagnose conditions.

The MVP focuses on two conditions, acne and seborrheic dermatitis, and the mechanisms and ingredients most discussed in the dermatology literature for each.

For users who want to go deeper, an opt-in Expert Mode surfaces a Science Layer with manually curated links to public scientific resources — AlphaFold DB for protein structures, UniProt, Open Targets, and PubMed. SkinCortex does not run real-time structure prediction, does not perform genetic analysis, and does not integrate with any internal drug discovery platform.