What the lab results section is for, and what it refuses to be

On a lot of the products this site writes about, the label stopped being a description of the contents some time ago.

Kratom extracts sold at concentrations the package does not state. Products marketed under a botanical name that contained a synthetic compound instead. Mushroom gummies sold as one thing and containing another. Pre-workout powders whose active ingredient changed between batches under the same name and the same artwork. In every one of those, the argument about what is actually in the bottle gets settled by exactly one thing: somebody running the sample through an instrument.

Those results exist. They are scattered across laboratory sites, forum threads and PDFs that go dead. This section collects them.

An entry here is a test, not a product

That distinction is the whole design, and it is load-bearing.

Each entry records one test of one sample: what was tested, who tested it, when, what they found, and where the report is. The product is named because the sample was of that product. Naming it is the evidence. Recommending it is not something this section can do, because there is nowhere to put a recommendation.

There is no price field. There is no vendor field. There is no link to anywhere selling anything, no stock, no discount code, no seller rating, and there will not be. A submission whose text points at somewhere to buy something is refused automatically, before a human sees it, with that reason. This site has never carried vendor content and this section is the closest it comes to the line, so the line is drawn in the database rather than in a policy somebody has to remember.

Independent results and the seller's own, kept apart

By default this section shows results that were commissioned by somebody with no interest in the answer.

Certificates of analysis from the seller are also recorded, clearly labelled, and hidden behind a toggle. We keep them for one reason: a seller's own certificate that contradicts an independent test is evidence, and throwing it away would throw away the contradiction. What we will not do is let the two sit in one undifferentiated list. Every entry says which it is, in the loudest place on the card, and where the report does not say who paid for it, the entry says that instead of guessing.

What you can and cannot conclude from an entry

A result tells you what was in that sample. It does not tell you what is in the bottle in front of you. Formulations change, batches vary, and several of the products this section covers have been reformulated under an unchanged name. Two tests of the same product that disagree are both kept, deliberately, because that disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the page.

We do not publish a pass or a fail. There is no badge saying a product matches its label, and there is no safety rating. A chromatogram establishes composition. Safety is a different question and a harder one, and a green tick would answer it dishonestly.

Submitting one

Use the form on the Lab Results page. You will need the laboratory, the product as it is printed on the package, the date, what was found, and a link to the report. Lot number if the package carries one. Then it waits for a moderator, and your own view of it says so in words the whole time.

If it is listed, it is credited to you.

Two limits worth stating plainly

We do not fetch the report. The link is stored and shown, never retrieved by our server, for the same reason we never let anything a stranger types cause us to make a request: the address would be theirs to choose. We check the links ourselves, from outside the site, on a schedule.

A dead report goes dark and says so. When a report link stops working the entry stays, with the date it stopped. A directory that silently drops the things it can no longer reach is a directory hiding how out of date it is.

And the obvious one: a test in this section is somebody else's work, not ours. We record who did it so you can judge it. Where a laboratory's own methods or independence are in question, that is a fair thing to raise in the comments under the entry.