Where the warning lives
Across thirty-three reviews the safety copy is almost always written, and almost never on the page taking the money. Placement is now the finding, not absence.
We began this register expecting to find companies that did not know what their drugs did. That is not what is there. Almost every warning we have gone looking for exists somewhere on the seller's own website, correctly worded, often written by someone who plainly understands the pharmacology. It is filed away from the page where the decision happens.
Dermatica is the clearest case. Its tretinoin ingredient page states that tretinoin should not be used in pregnancy, when planning pregnancy, or while breastfeeding, and advises contraception during treatment and for a month after. That is the correct warning, correctly written. Across five Dermatica treatment pages — the pages that open the consultation and take the payment — we found no pregnancy contra-indication at all.
The warning is not missing from the company. It is missing from the page.
The same company's fullest pregnancy statement, complete with named pregnancy-safe alternatives, sits on a $39.99 cosmetic serum. The prescription retinoid page has none. Alloy takes the pattern further: six product pages, each with a tab headed Safety Information, and no risk named in the visible copy of any of them. On four of those six, the tab contains a product description.
What the good version looks like
Three companies in the register have solved this, in ascending order of effort.
- Agency was first to carry a pregnancy warning on a retinoid product page at all — fifteen reviews in, and still the only compounded brand to have done it by default.
- Ro attaches Important Safety Information to each drug ingredient, linked from the ingredient card where you read about it: contra-indications, an honest pregnancy position, titration, interactions, and a route to report adverse events to the FDA with a URL and a phone number.
- Honeydew puts the teratogenicity warning above the fold in the regulator's own language, before the price, and volunteers on the same screen that the regimen it sells is off-label.
Boxed pregnancy warning above the fold, in FDA language, before the price.
Per-ingredient safety information signposted from the ingredient itself, with an FDA reporting route.
Contra-indications, pregnancy category, nursing and paediatric sections printed on the page rather than linked.
The first product here to carry a pregnancy warning on a retinoid page.
Concentrations on the page, and the pregnancy warning two clicks away on an ingredient page.
A teratogen-class topical sold to perimenopausal women with no pregnancy content at all.
Why placement is the harder problem
A missing warning is ambiguous. It can be an oversight, a template that was never finished, a page shipped in a hurry. A warning that exists in good prose on an adjacent page is none of those things — it is evidence that the company knows, has written it down, and decided this was not the screen for it.
That decision is legible in the pattern. Warnings cluster on ingredient libraries, blog posts and cosmetic product pages. They thin out on treatment pages. They disappear entirely on the pages selling the newest and most commercially fashionable indications.
We score disclosure on the page a buyer actually reads before paying, and we will keep doing that. A support-centre article is a good thing to have written and it is not a warning if nobody is sent to it.
EVERY FIGURE IN THIS ENTRY IS DRAWN FROM THE REVIEW REGISTER OR A CITED SOURCE. RECORD NUMBERS RESOLVE. NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.