Who is behind Truva.

What Truva is

An ingredient checker for people whose answer changes with their situation.

You set a profile once. Truva then reads the whole ingredient list on a product, not the two things a brand prints on the front, and returns each entry as SAFE, CAUTION or AVOID for that profile, with the reason written out and the body behind the flag named on the flag itself. Those are the app’s three words, and the website prints the same three. If a product is not in the catalogue you photograph the label and it reads that instead.

It runs on iPhone. There is no Android app and no web version, and no honest date we can give you for either. The App Store listing is in review, so it is not something you can download today, and we would rather write that sentence than run a download button that goes nowhere. One part does work in any browser: a shared product page opens the full breakdown, every flag on it and the body behind each flag, with no app and no account.

Scanning against the catalogue is free, at one product check a day. Truva Pro lifts that limit and adds label scanning, at $29.99 once or $4.99 a month. Truva is not the cheapest thing in its category and does not claim to be.

Why it exists

Most product scanners answer one question: is this product good. That is a useful question and it is not the one somebody standing in a pharmacy aisle at twenty weeks actually has. Theirs is narrower and harder: is this fine for me, this month, given what is going on with my body, and who says so.

A single score cannot answer that, because the answer is not a property of the product. It is a relation between the product and the person, and it moves between pregnancy, breastfeeding, postpartum, trying to conceive, PCOS and general use. Two people can scan the same bottle, get different verdicts, and both readings can be correct. Building for that is the entire reason Truva exists, and it is why the six profiles are held apart rather than folded into one pregnancy setting.

The second half of it is the naming. A flag that says trust us is an opinion; a flag that says which body published the concern is something you can take to a midwife in the fifteen minutes an appointment gives you.

If that sounds abstract, it is easier to see on a page. Retinol is the clean case, flagged in three profiles and clear in the other three. Salicylic acid is the harder one, where the published guidance turns on how much and over how much skin rather than on a flat yes or no.

Who makes it

Truva is made by a small independent team.

The company behind it is named in clause one of the Terms and Conditions and at the top of the Privacy Policy, which is where the entity you are contracting with has to be identified.

Truva has no named medical reviewer. Nobody with a clinical qualification signs off a verdict before you see it. That is a real gap, we would rather name it than shade it, and it is the single largest one on this site. When there is a reviewer to name, they will be named here with their credential, and not before.

Mail goes to a person rather than a ticket queue, and we read all of it. That is not a service promise so much as a description of the size of the team.

How it is paid for

By the people who use it. There are no brand deals, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no paid verdicts.

The obvious way to make money from a product scanner is to sell brands a better position in it, or to take a commission on whatever you buy instead. Both put a price on the verdict, and once a flag can be bought, every unflagged product on the shelf becomes ambiguous: you have no way of telling whether it came back clean or came back paid for. That is a worse product for everybody, including the brands with nothing to hide.

It is also why there is a price at all. $29.99 once, from the person reading the verdict, is a smaller business than a percentage of what they buy next. It is also the only arrangement in which the verdict is the same verdict whoever made the product. The same rule runs through the comparison pages on this site: where another app is genuinely the better choice, they say so, and every figure quoted about a competitor links to the page that competitor publishes it on.

What Truva does not have

Stated here rather than discovered later. Every one of these is a real limitation today.

• No clinical review. Assessments summarise published guidance and go out without a clinician reading them.
• No Android app and no web app. iPhone only, and the scanner, the label reader and the per profile scoring are one codebase built against one camera stack. Building it twice at half the quality would be worse.
• Nothing to download yet. The App Store listing is in review, which is Apple’s queue and not ours.
• Uneven catalogue coverage. Mass market skincare and colour cosmetics are covered well because the catalogue is built from ingredient databases and from the shelves of Walmart, Target, Ulta and Sephora. A small independent brand may not be there yet.
• Not medical advice, and not a medical device. Truva has no access to your medical history, your medication or your allergies. It can tell you what published guidance says about an ingredient. It cannot tell you whether the product in your hand is right for you.

How to reach us

One mailbox, read by a person. If a page here says a body said something and that body did not, that is the message we most want to receive.

Truva summarises published guidance from bodies including ACOG, the FDA, the EU SCCS and the Cosmetic Ingredient Review. It has no access to your medical history and it is not a substitute for your doctor, dermatologist or midwife. Nothing on this site has been reviewed by a clinician, and nothing on it is a diagnosis or a prescription. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding or being treated for PCOS, take the ingredient list to the person looking after you.