Potion
Potion AI, Inc. · Video
Potion is an AI platform for beauty and personal care teams. It searches 80,000+ raw materials, reverse-engineers benchmark INCI lists into starter formulas and screens for compliance.
About Potion
What Is Potion
Potion is an AI platform built for the beauty and personal care industry. It covers three jobs that usually live in separate tools and spreadsheets: finding ingredients, drafting formulas, and checking whether either meets regulatory and retailer standards. The company is Potion AI, Inc., based in San Francisco.
The free Discovery Platform is the entry point. You search raw materials in plain language, look up how retail products are built, paste a competitor's INCI list and get a starting formula back. That last step is the feature formulators talk about most, because it turns a slow research task into a few minutes of work.
The paid side is aimed at companies. Ingredient Vault digitizes your ingredient documents, Formulation adds a generative co-pilot to your formula work, and Compliance automates screening. The main limit: most of the depth sits behind a custom-priced Enterprise plan, so you need to talk to sales before you know what it costs.
Getting Started
- Create a free account on the Potion site with your work email.
- Search raw materials or retail products in natural language to get a feel for the ingredient database.
- Paste a benchmark INCI list into the reverse engineering tool and review the starter formula it returns.
- Run a compliance screen against FDA, Canada or retailer standards before you take the formula into the lab.
- Ask for a demo if you need Ingredient Vault, the formulation workspace or API access for your team.
Product Information
A quick look at Potion's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Cosmetic chemists and formulators
- R&D and regulatory teams at beauty brands
- Indie skincare founders
Tasks
- Reverse-engineering a benchmark product
- Finding a raw material that fits your constraints
- Screening a formula for compliance
- Digitizing supplier documents
Scenarios
- Early product brief research
- Reformulating an existing line
- Building a private ingredient library
Key features
Natural Language Ingredient Search
You type what you need in ordinary language, say a silicone-free emollient for sensitive skin, and Potion returns matching raw materials from a database of more than 80,000. Each result comes with function and usage context, so you can judge fit before ordering samples. It is the fastest way into cosmetic ingredient search for formulators who know the chemistry but not the catalog.
Deformulator Reverse Engineering
Paste a benchmark INCI list and the tool drafts a starting formula with trade names and concentration ranges. You get a usable jumping-off point in minutes rather than a research afternoon. It works best on products with published INCI lists, so it covers most mainstream retail beauty items.
Retail Product Search
Potion indexes thousands of beauty products from stores such as Sephora, Ulta and Credo. You can see how competitors build a product category and what ingredient patterns show up across brands. For a brand planning a launch, this is competitive analysis without scraping store pages by hand.
Ingredient Vault
This module stores your supplier documents in one place and extracts the data automatically. Potion claims 50+ fields per raw material and about 97 percent extraction accuracy, with 2 to 4 hours saved per material onboarded. You can send the digitized data out through the Potion API, CSV or Excel into whatever system your lab already uses.
GenAI Formulation Co-Pilot
The formulation workspace is Potion's cosmetic formulation software, pairing a formula editor with a generative co-pilot that proposes compliant formulas as you work. A private AI model can be trained on your own portfolio and keeps improving as your data grows. Teams that already keep formulas in spreadsheets will notice the difference in version control alone.
Agentic Compliance
Potion maintains the rule lists for retailer standards such as Sephora Clean and Target Clean, plus geographic restrictions, and screens ingredients against them. You can add unlimited custom brand restrictions. One-click reports show what a compliance change does to your whole portfolio, which matters when a retailer updates its list mid-season.
API and Data Export
The Enterprise plan lists API access, so digitized ingredient data can flow into your internal systems. This is the piece that makes Potion more than a lookup site: your own ingredient records become structured data you can query and reuse.
Enterprise Security
Potion is SOC 2 Type II certified and offers a private workspace for proprietary data. According to Potion, customer data stays owned and viewed only by the customer, and can be used to train in-house models. For brands protective of formula IP, that promise is usually the first question in a procurement call.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Free Discovery Platform: ingredient search, product search, reverse engineering and basic compliance screening cost nothing to try.
- Deep ingredient coverage: 80,000+ raw materials in the database, with a search that accepts plain language.
- Practical compliance mapping: retailer standards like Sephora Clean and Target Clean are maintained by Potion instead of you.
- Strong data story: the Ingredient Vault turns supplier PDFs into structured fields and exports them through API, CSV or Excel.
- Security credentials: SOC 2 Type II certification and a private workspace suit companies with formula IP to protect.
Cons
- Opaque paid pricing: the Enterprise plan is quote only, so budgeting takes a sales conversation.
- Free tier is research only: formulation workspace, Vault and compliance reports sit behind the paid plan.
- Trust in AI output: reverse-engineered formulas are a starting point, and a chemist still has to verify concentrations and interactions in the lab.
- Web only: there is no mobile app, which is awkward for quick checks on the bench or at a supplier visit.
Frequently asked questions
Potion is used by beauty and personal care teams to research ingredients, draft formulas and check compliance. You search a raw material database, reverse-engineer a benchmark INCI list, or screen a formula against retailer and regional rules. The free plan covers the research side.
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