Three years. One surgery. And a coconut.

It started with one bad day. Then another. My sinuses were always blocked, my head felt heavy, and I was tired in a way sleep didn’t fix. I told myself it would pass.

It didn’t.

I did everything right

I saw doctors. I had tests. The allergy results came back positive for several things: dust mites, coconut, and more. I read them, put them away, and kept looking for “the real problem”. Coconut? I thought that just meant skipping the coconut candy.

Then came sinus surgery. If you’ve had it, you know. If you haven’t: the pain, the packing, the weeks of recovery, the nights of not being able to breathe. I went through all of it because I believed it would finally fix me.

It fixed nothing.

The sentence that changed everything

Not long after, I ended up in the emergency room. And there, an ear, nose and throat specialist said the thing nobody had said in three years: this is inflammatory. She thought allergies were what was inflaming me.

I went home and took out those allergy tests again. This time I read them properly. And then I started reading labels.

Coconut was everywhere

My shampoo. My soap. My face cream. My lip balm. The “natural” products I’d switched to because I thought they were better for me. Even the popcorn at the movies, popped in coconut oil.

It was hiding behind names I would never have recognized: cocamidopropyl betaine, coco-glucoside, caprylic/capric triglyceride. Nothing on the front of the bottle warned me. Nothing on the “free from” lists mentioned it.

For three years I had been putting the very thing I’m allergic to on my scalp, my face and my lips. Every single day. Without knowing. Slowly poisoning my own body while I searched for the cause everywhere else.

So I started checking

When I went looking for help, I couldn’t find it. Most coconut allergy information is written for shoppers in the US or the UK. Nobody was checking the brands on the shelves where I shop, in Spanish, one label at a time.

So I did it myself. I checked more than 25 shampoos in two stores in Panama. Every single one contained coconut. I checked the baby aisle, the one you’d expect to be gentlest. Every product failed.

That’s why this site exists: so you don’t lose three years like I did.

If you live with sinus problems, rashes or inflammation that nobody can explain, start reading your labels, and take your allergy results to your allergist. It might not be coconut for you. But you deserve to know what you’re putting on your body every day.

Why a human checks everything

Ingredient lists are hard to read, change without notice, and hide coconut behind chemical names. The label checker on this site is a good first filter, but a photo can blur and a name can be missed. That’s why every product in our database, every brand answer and every label you send us is read by a person before it goes live, and every entry shows the date it was checked.

What we will never say

We never call a product “safe”. The most a label can tell you is that no coconut is listed by name. Many ingredients, like glycerin and fatty alcohols, can come from coconut or palm, and companies rarely say which. So we write to them, and publish what they answer.

No ads, no tracking

No ads, no cookies, no analytics. The label checker runs on your own device: your photo never leaves it.

Where the barcode data comes from

When you look up a barcode, the product details come from Open Food Facts and Open Beauty Facts, two open databases written by volunteers around the world, used under the ODbL licence. Their lists can be incomplete or out of date, so we say so every time, and we still read the ingredients with the same word lists we use everywhere else. The label in your hand is always the last word.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a brand you’d like us to ask? Write to us.