“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.
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