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Ingredient ratings / Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter

Is cocoa butter comedogenic? What the pore-clogging tests found

By Skinredients · Checked against the sources 2026-10-16

Cocoa butter graded 4 out of 5 in Fulton's 1989 rabbit-ear test (10% in propylene glycol), which the paper counts as a positive result, and it was one of nine materials deemed positive in a 2007 rabbit study by Nguyen, Dang and Maibach. It is one of the few plant fats where two labs agree on a positive. The caveat is that both are animal tests of the raw butter, not of finished products on human skin.

Label name
Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter
Also listed as
cocoa butter, cacao butter, theobroma cacao seed butter, theobroma oil
Comedogenic grade
4 / 5 · Positive in the test (4–5)
Tests

What the tests found

Cocoa butter is one of the most consistently flagged plant ingredients in the comedogenicity literature, and two separate rabbit studies support that.

Fulton 1989. Diluted 1:9 in propylene glycol for Fulton’s two-week test (method), cocoa butter reached a plugging grade of 4 out of 5 without any surface irritation (0) [1]. Fulton counts a 4 or 5 as a positive result, the band he found reproducible from test to test. Grade 5 is the level of his positive control, isopropyl myristate. Only one other entry in the oils section reached 4: coconut butter, also with no irritation. The highest of the liquid oils was 3 [1].

Fulton ties this result to clinical experience. He writes that natural oils such as cocoa butter and coconut butter had long been known to cause problems with pomade acne, and that the rabbit ear confirmed it [1]. Pomade acne is the dense crop of open and closed comedones that can form on skin next to the scalp in people who use greasy hair-grooming products daily [3]. As with every entry in Fulton’s oils section, the grade is flagged as dependent on where the raw material came from [1].

Nguyen, Dang & Maibach 2007. This group tested 14 cosmetic materials in the rabbit external ear canal. Cocoa butter was one of the nine deemed positive, alongside isopropyl myristate, isopropyl palmitate and other fatty esters. Petrolatum, paraffin, cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol and sodium lauryl sulfate were not [2]. Only the abstract was available, so the concentration and grade for cocoa butter are not known.

Where the evidence is weaker

  • No grade from Nguyen. The abstract gives a yes/no outcome only [2]. Fulton’s single grade of 4 remains the only number.
  • The chemistry doesn’t obviously explain it. Fulton’s explanation for fatty-acid comedogenicity is that mid-chain fatty acids (lauric, myristic) penetrate and plug follicles, while larger molecules cause less reaction [1]. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) lists cocoa butter’s fatty acids as palmitic 24–29%, stearic 34–36%, oleic 30–40% and linoleic 2.4%, all C16–C18 [4]. Neither paper explains why cocoa butter tests positive, so the mechanism is open.
  • Pomade acne involved many greases. In 1996, Kligman (a co-author of the original pomade acne report with Fulton) noted that it also implicated Vaseline. He later found refined petrolatum non-comedogenic and blamed some of the grease problem on poor-quality products [3]. The clinical link for cocoa butter specifically is not quantified in these sources.
  • Finished products may behave differently. Draelos and DiNardo tested finished products on the backs of six comedone-prone volunteers. A product built on a flagged ingredient did not reliably produce comedones in their test [5]. That study did not test cocoa butter by name.

Where it shows up, and how much

In cosmetics. The CIR’s 2017 assessment of plant-derived fatty acid oils reports 442 uses of cocoa seed butter, at 0.000002–37%, based on 2010 FDA registrations and industry surveys [4]:

  • Leave-on products: 367 uses, up to 37%
  • Rinse-off products: 75 uses, up to 2%
  • Possible ingestion (lip products): 33 uses, at 37%, the highest concentration reported
  • Eye-area products: 11 uses, up to 9%
  • Hair products (non-coloring): 24 uses, up to 2%
  • Baby products: 8 uses, at 0.01%

As an OTC skin protectant. The FDA’s over-the-counter skin protectant monograph lists cocoa butter at 50 to 100 percent as an active ingredient [6]. A product that names cocoa butter as its active skin protectant is mostly cocoa butter. That is a much larger dose than Fulton’s 10% test.

If you want to avoid it

Cocoa butter has the highest published grade of any butter or oil in this dataset, tied with coconut butter (also 4) [1]. Swapping one plant butter for another is therefore not a safe assumption. Shea butter, the most-used ingredient in the CIR’s 2017 plant-oil review, has no published comedogenicity grade in our dataset, which is not the same as a low one [4]. Firm, rich ingredients that do have lower published results:

  • Hydrogenated castor oil, a hardened plant oil: 1, irritation 0 (Fulton 1989) [1]
  • Behenyl triglyceride, a fully saturated triglyceride: 0 (Fulton 1989) [1]
  • Ceresin, a mineral wax: 0 (Fulton 1989) [1]
  • Petrolatum: negative in a human face study and a revised rabbit test (Kligman 1996) [3]

Hydrogenated vegetable oil, another solid fat, graded 3 in Fulton’s table and is not a low-graded swap either [1]. On a label, cocoa butter appears as Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter, sometimes shortened to “theobroma oil.”

Sources

  1. Fulton JE Jr. Comedogenicity and irritancy of commonly used ingredients in skin care products. J Soc Cosmet Chem. 1989;40(6):321-333. https://library.scconline.org/v040n06/13
  2. Nguyen SH, Dang TP, Maibach HI. Comedogenicity in rabbit: some cosmetic ingredients/vehicles. Cutan Ocul Toxicol. 2007;26(4):287-292. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18058303/
  3. Kligman AM. Petrolatum is not comedogenic in rabbits or humans: a critical reappraisal of the rabbit ear assay and the concept of “acne cosmetica”. J Soc Cosmet Chem. 1996;47(1):41-48. https://library.scconline.org/v047n01/44
  4. Burnett CL, Fiume MM, Bergfeld WF, et al. Safety Assessment of Plant-Derived Fatty Acid Oils. Int J Toxicol. 2017;36(Suppl 3):51S-129S. https://cir-reports.cir-safety.org/view-attachment/?id=ad62ac6b-8e74-ec11-8943-0022482f06a6 (abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29243540/)
  5. Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2006;54(3):507-512. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16488305/
  6. 21 CFR 347.10, Skin protectant active ingredients, paragraph (d) (2025 edition). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title21-vol5/xml/CFR-2025-title21-vol5-sec347-10.xml

Comedogenic grades describe single raw materials tested in a lab, usually on rabbit ears. They are a guide for acne-prone skin, not a prediction for any product or person, and this page is not medical advice. How the scale works.