Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Actives & Acidsis free to read because it is supported by affiliate links. When you click a product link and buy something, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. That commission is how the site pays for itself. It does not change which products we recommend, the order we rank them, or what we say about them. This disclosure is provided in the spirit of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on endorsements, so you always know when a link can earn us money.

Amazon Associates

Actives & Acids is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Amazon is our retailer at launch, and product links on the site are Amazon links tagged with our associate tag, t5skincare-20.

How the links work

When you tap a buy button, the link is routed through a redirect on our own domain (a /go link) that attaches the t5skincare-20 tag and forwards you to the product on Amazon. That is what lets Amazon attribute the sale to us so we earn the commission. These outbound links are marked as sponsored and open in a new tab, and every buy button carries an #adlabel and a link back to this page. The redirect adds nothing to your price and collects no payment details — the checkout is entirely Amazon’s.

About the prices you see

Prices shown next to a buy button are pulled live from the retailer and stamped with the date they were pulled — they come from Amazon, not from us, and they change constantly. A price can be different by the time you click, so always confirm the current figure on Amazon’s own page before buying. Where we don’t have a live price, the button reads “Check price on Amazon” rather than showing a stale number.

Other programs

We may add other retailer or brand programs over time. If we do, the same rule applies: a link earns us a commission only through a program we have actually joined, and we would rather send you to the option that is better for you — cheaper per milliliter, in stock, better formulated — than to the one that pays us more.

Why you can trust the recommendations anyway

The reasoning behind a pick is identical whether or not a link earns us anything. We regularly recommend the cheaper product, we’ll tell you when to skip a category entirely, and we take no sponsored placements and no free products. How we actually evaluate products — stated concentrations, formulation, cost-per-mL, cited studies — is documented on our methodology page, and the standards we hold ourselves to are in our editorial policy.

Not medical advice

Actives & Acids is written by a skincare enthusiast, not a dermatologist, and nothing on the site is medical advice. For a diagnosis, a skin reaction, or a prescription treatment, please see a qualified professional.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you want to know whether a specific link earns us a commission, ask us— we’ll tell you straight.