CAM Reference

Does Coconut Oil Clog Pores? What Comedogenic Ratings Really Tell You

Coconut oil is widely rated as highly pore-clogging. That rating comes from a testing tradition with known limits — here is where the number came from, what it can support, and what it cannot.

Last reviewed: July 16, 2026

The short answer

Coconut oil is widely described as pore-clogging, and numbered "comedogenic ratings" circulate across skincare sites placing it near the top of the scale. Those numbers are usually what sends people looking for an answer in the first place.

Here is the difficulty: those circulating ratings are not traceable to a published source we can open and check. They are reproduced from list to list without citation, and the testing tradition they descend from has documented limits. Comedogenicity screening of this kind was historically performed on raw ingredients in isolation using animal models — and when the underlying assumption was tested on human skin in 2006, the researchers found that finished products containing comedogenic ingredients are not necessarily comedogenic.

That does not make the concern imaginary. It means the number is doing more work than the evidence behind it can support. This page is about what comedogenicity testing can and cannot establish, and why "does it clog pores?" is a harder question than a single figure suggests. It is educational and does not tell anyone what to put on their face.

What "comedogenic" actually means

A comedo is a blocked hair follicle. When oil and shed skin cells accumulate and plug the follicle's opening, the result is visible at the surface as a blackhead or whitehead. "Comedogenic" means tending to produce comedones. The acne reference page covers how comedones fit into acne more broadly — oil production, follicular blockage, bacterial activity, and inflammation all interact, and blockage is one component rather than the whole story.

Note what the word does not mean. It is not a synonym for "causes acne," and it says nothing on its own about inflammatory lesions.

Where the idea came from

The concern has a real origin in dermatology. In 1972, Albert Kligman and Otto Mills published a paper titled "Acne cosmetica" in Archives of Dermatology; the record is indexed under acne vulgaris causes and the adverse effects of cosmetics. It put an idea into circulation that had not been formalised before: cosmetic products themselves might provoke comedones, and might therefore need screening for it.

Screening needs a model, and the model the field used was an animal one. The 2006 re-evaluation discussed below describes the history plainly: animal models "were originally used to determine the comedogenic potential of raw materials," carrying the assumption that finished formulations containing those ingredients would behave the same way.

Two features of that tradition matter more than any individual score. The testing was performed on ingredients in isolation, not on products as sold. And it was performed on animals, not on the human faces the question is actually about.

We were not able to open a published, authoritative source that assigns coconut oil a specific number on a comedogenic scale, or that documents how the widely circulated ingredient lists were compiled. Commercial rating lists reproduce those figures without citation. That absence is itself worth knowing: it is the reason this page describes the testing tradition rather than repeating a score.

Why the model was challenged

This is not a modern revisionist complaint. It was raised inside dermatology while the method was in active use.

In 1982, writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, S.B. Frank published a paper whose title asked the question directly: "Is the rabbit ear model, in its present state, prophetic of acnegenicity?" His answer was largely no. Frank documented "the many problems in performance of the test method, the absence of correlation with experience in the human, and serious limitations to the conclusions that can reasonably be drawn."

That middle phrase is the load-bearing one. A model that does not correlate with what happens on human skin cannot settle what will happen on human skin, however precise its output looks.

Then, in 2006, Draelos and DiNardo published "A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept" in the same journal. They took the assumption directly — that a finished product inherits its ingredients' comedogenicity — and tested it using a modification of the Mills and Kligman human assay, in six participants, on the upper back. Their conclusion was blunt: finished products using comedogenic ingredients are not necessarily comedogenic.

That finding undercuts the most common everyday use of ingredient ratings. Reading an ingredient's score and concluding that a product containing it will clog your pores is precisely the inference the study found does not reliably hold. The study's own limits are worth stating alongside it: six participants is a small sample, and the upper back is not the face.

What is actually known about coconut oil

Set the ratings aside and look at the material itself.

Coconut oil's fatty-acid profile is unusual among plant oils: a barrier-function review in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences reports it as roughly 49% lauric acid, 18% myristic acid, 8% palmitic, 8% caprylic, 7% capric, 6% oleic, 2% linoleic, and 2% stearic. It is dominated by saturated medium- and long-chain fatty acids, and it is notably low in linoleic acid — the fatty acid that same review associates with maintaining the skin's water-permeability barrier.

Here the story gets genuinely complicated rather than simply bad. Lauric acid, coconut oil's dominant component, has demonstrated antimicrobial activity against the bacterium implicated in inflammatory acne. A 2009 study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology found lauric acid's minimum inhibitory concentrations against Propionibacterium acnes (now Cutibacterium acnes) were about 15 times lower than benzoyl peroxide's, and reported reduced bacterial counts and inflammation in laboratory and animal models. The same barrier review notes that monolaurin, a lauric acid derivative, "displays antimicrobial activity by disintegrating the lipid membrane of lipid-coated bacteria including Propionibacterium acnes."

So the popular account — coconut oil is pore-clogging and therefore bad for acne-prone skin — sits alongside laboratory findings pointing the other way on one of acne's mechanisms. Neither line of evidence resolves the question. Antimicrobial activity in a dish or a mouse is not a demonstration of benefit on a human face, and an animal-model ingredient rating is not a demonstration of harm on one either. Both are upstream of the question people are actually asking.

What has been studied in humans is coconut oil's moisturising behaviour, not its effect on pores. A trial of 117 children with mild-to-moderate atopic dermatitis reported greater improvement in SCORAD scores with virgin coconut oil than with mineral oil, and an earlier adult study reported reductions in bacterial colonisation. A Pediatric Dermatology review of olive, coconut, and sunflower seed oils for moisturisation concluded that "further studies are needed to make definitive recommendations regarding the use of coconut and sunflower seed oil." A 2021 summary of systematic reviews on coconut oil's health effects likewise found the dermatological evidence limited, in contrast to its stronger cardio-metabolic findings.

Why individual responses vary so much

People report sharply different experiences with coconut oil on the face. Nothing in the evidence base resolves who is right, and several structural reasons sit behind that:

  • A rating is not person-specific. An ingredient score is a single number produced under test conditions; it was never designed to predict an individual's response.
  • Formulation changes things. The 2006 human re-evaluation found that finished products containing comedogenic ingredients were not necessarily comedogenic — concentration and the rest of the formula matter.
  • Skin varies. Baseline oil production and how readily follicles block differ between people; the acne page describes those interacting factors in more detail.
  • Test site is not the face. The 2006 human assay was conducted on the upper back — a different site from the one most of this question is about.

That is not a satisfying answer, but it is the accurate one: the variability is real, and the scale was never built to explain it.

A material's properties are not a treatment plan

It is worth stating the boundary plainly. Whether a substance tends to block follicles under test conditions is a question about the material. Whether anyone should apply it to their skin — or stop applying it — is a different question, involving that person's skin, history, and any conditions being managed. This page answers the first and deliberately does not answer the second.

Persistent, painful, scarring, or worsening acne is a medical matter with effective treatments available. Someone in that situation is better served by a clinician than by an ingredient rating, and swapping oils on the basis of an uncited number is not a substitute for that assessment.

Related materials people compare it to

The oils most often raised as alternatives differ from coconut oil in composition rather than in some binary of safe versus unsafe:

None of those is presented here as a recommendation. Each carries its own evidence base, most of it thinner than the confident tone of the surrounding market suggests. The coconut oil reference page covers its processing grades, safety profile, and dietary context, which are outside this page's scope.

FAQs

So does coconut oil clog pores or not? The published evidence does not settle it. Coconut oil is widely rated as highly comedogenic, but those circulating ratings are not traceable to a source we could open and verify, and they descend from a tradition of testing raw ingredients in animal models — a model a 1982 dermatology paper found showed an absence of correlation with human experience. A 2006 human study then found that finished products containing comedogenic ingredients are not necessarily comedogenic. What can be said is that the confident number is not the measurement it appears to be.

Where do comedogenic ratings come from? From a screening tradition that followed the 1972 "acne cosmetica" paper, which put the idea of cosmetic-provoked comedones into circulation. As the 2006 re-evaluation describes it, animal models were originally used to determine the comedogenic potential of raw materials, assuming finished products containing them would behave the same way. We could not verify how the specific numbered lists circulating online today were compiled.

Coconut oil kills acne bacteria in lab studies — doesn't that make it good for acne? It does not follow. Lauric acid shows potent activity against the acne-associated bacterium in laboratory and animal work, at concentrations well below benzoyl peroxide's in one study. But activity in a dish or a mouse is not evidence of benefit on a human face, and acne involves blockage, oil, and inflammation as well as bacteria. It is a reason the popular account is oversimplified, not a reason to reverse it.

Why do people report such different experiences with it? Because an ingredient rating was never person-specific: it is a single figure produced under test conditions on ingredients in isolation, and human skin varies in oil production and how readily follicles block. Formulation matters too — which is what the 2006 human re-evaluation demonstrated when it found finished products did not simply inherit their ingredients' behaviour.

References