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A small 2026 trial (28 people) found a serum with 1.5% of the seaweed gel bumped up hand hydration for at least an hour compared to the hyaluronic acid control.

There's also some anti-aging research with an asterisk: scientists chopped the polysaccharide down to a tiny 4 kDa version and found it soaked into skin better than hyaluronic acid, calmed inflammation markers, reduced collagen-degrading MMPs, and improved wrinkles in UV-exposed mice.

While this is encouraging, it's way too big to go anywhere so it mostly stays on the surface of skin doing hydration duty.

It has a pretty solid safety profile: low cytotoxicity at its use level, negative genotoxicity data, human sensitization testing done at 0.8%, and no allergy case reports floating around.

You'll see algae listed as a 5/5 on a lot of pore-clogging charts and that number doesn't come from anywhere; it's not in the original rabbit-ear studies that most comedogenic ratings trace back to.

The reasoning behind the reputation is that seaweed is high in iodine and iodine can trigger acne-like breakouts when eaten. This traces back to a 1976 letter in Archives of Dermatology describing two women whose breakouts cleared after they stopped taking high-dose kelp supplements orally.

And the reaction of these two women wasn't clogged pores at all: it was an iodine-triggered pustular rash. Later research found normal dietary iodine doesn't meaningfully affect acne either and nobody has shown topical algae delivers enough iodine to matter.

What we do have is dozens of brown and red algae ingredients found to be non-irritating and non-sensitizing, and a handful of studies that found algae compounds may actually help acne.

However, plenty of people do report breaking out from algae-containing products. Skin is individual and it's worth avoiding if yours has reacted to algae before.

Due to it being edible and tasteless, you'll likely find this ingredient in breath freshener strips. This ingredient is produced from the starch of the fungus, Aureobasidium pullulans.

Pullulan is stable over a broad-range of pH.