“Inactive Ingredients” are virtually always defined as the ingredients that don’t play an active role in the product but it’s literally called A+D ointment bc of those vitamins (active are Petrolatum & Lanolin).
Similarly, in A&D+E ointments, Petrolatum is the only active ingredient & the vitamins are all listed under inactive. By this logic there is no real difference in using Vaseline vs A&D+E ointment since those vitamins would supposedly have no active effect.
TL;DR we know vitamins A, D, and E are very much an active component to these ointments (per their namesakes) so why are they listed as inactive?
EDIT: My current theory is that there hasn’t been FDA evaluation/approval for these applications of vitamins A, D & E & therefore they can’t be listed as “Active”…but you’d think vitamins’ healing properties on the skin would be low-hanging fruit for FDA evaluation.
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Your current theory seems correct to me. Only things that have been scientifically proven to have statistically significant effect can be considered active ingredients. It’s possible that the vitamins May provide benefit but it apparently is not worth the cost to prove that in a scientific study.
>but you’d think vitamins’ healing properties on the skin would be low-hanging fruit for FDA evaluation.
If external vitamins have a healing effect on the outer, entirely biologically dead, layer of the skin that would indeed be low-hanging fruit.
*Do* external vitamins have a healing effect on dead cells?
>we know vitamins A, D, and E are very much an active component to these ointments (per their namesakes) so why are they listed as inactive?
We know vitamins A, D, and E are very much an active component of the branding of these ointments.
We don’t know that they’re an active component. In fact, it says right on the container that they aren’t.
To make the claim that their product is superior to vasoline (+/- lanolin) requires proving the vitamins do something. That proof requires an expensive clinical trial, and creates the opportunity to fail to prove what you want. Why would they take on the expense/risk when the implication from the name worked so well on you?
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