Flamingo is  a platform designed to serve many needs related to consumer products and ingredients safety and earth-friendliness. It contains the ingredient lists of thousands of skin and hair care products, mostly from the USA and France at this stage, and it is able to recognise over 30000 ingredients, including over 2000 essential oils, 100s of common allergens etc. 

There are 3 main, additional reasons why Flamingo is unique and will hopefully help you:

1. Personalisation, flexibility and breadth of use
2. Based on exceptional, expert knowledge of skin, health and ingredients
3. Preserving your personal data

We expand below on each of these points.

1. Personalisation, flexibility and breadth of use

• Flamingo is designed to fit personal needs. Therefore, a core feature is that it allows you, the user, to define personal lists of ingredients that you want to avoid or flag, either because you know that you do not want them specifically (e.g., because you are allergic to them), or because you want Flamingo to exclude or flag them when you indicate you have a specific condition (e.g., you are pregnant, or have hypersensitive skin, or have acne). This personal list of ingredients (your Exclusion List in Flamingo's language) can be used to assess products in Flamingo's database, and also any product you find on the web.
• Flamingo can be used on any common device and system that accesses the internet, and one can easily save their work on one device and come back later from the same or another device.
• Flamingo is open. In particular, any person with basic tech knowledge of their device may create their own shortcuts and widgets to facilitate their use of Flamingo. A case in point is the shortcuts available for users of recent iPhones and iPads, which make it possible to find and assess the ingredients of any product available on the web (not just the ones in Flamingo's database) with just a few clicks. 
• Flamingo serves many different types of need, from the casual to the professional. Below are some of the common ones:
  • Consumers
    • Case1: I have a product in front of me, at home or in a shop, and I want to know if its ingredients match my personal criteria
    • Case2: I found a product on a website that seems interesting and I want to know if its ingredients match my personal criteria
    • Case3: I need a new moisturizer (or a shampoo or anything really) and I want to search Flamingo's database to find one that matches my criteria (e.g., "I do not want ingredients that my doctor says I am allergic to", or "I am pregnant and do not want products that are not recommended during this special time"
    • Case4: I had a bad reaction to a skin or hair care product and I really want to know which ingredients caused the reaction, so that I can avoid these ingredients in the future
  • Medical professionnals
    • Case1: I have patients who need skincare or dermatological products but they are allergic to specific ingredients (or who have very sensitive skin, or who are pregnant...). How can I be sure to recommend them the right products and how can I help them find products that are really safe for them?
  • Retailers and pharmacists
    • Case1: Clients are coming all the time in my shop and scan the products with some apps, then discard them and ask if I have alternatives. How can I know which of my products will match these clients' needs? 
    • Case2: Customers come in and ask for skin and hair products (or perfumes, or personal care products...) that do not contain ingredients x or y because they are allergic to it or because their just read a bad article about these ingredients. What can I offer?

2.  Based on exceptional, expert knowledge of skin, health and ingredients

• Flamingo is developed by the scientists and service teams at Skintifique, the young company which has been providing breakthrough effective, safe and ethical skincare products for several years. The idea of Flamingo came when the team wondered about how best to share the exceptional knowledge of skin care they accumulated, as well as that of the challenges faced by every person looking to preserve their skin and health, while also wanting to meet their personal ethical criteria ("good for the planet" ...). 
• Information on ingredients, their intrinsic properties as well as when they are not recommended, therefore comes from the deep knowledge accumulated by Skintifique scientists and their medical and scientific collaborators, public scientific litterature, as well as feedbacks from consumers and professionals that our team members speaks with everyday.

3. Preserving your personal data

There is no such thing as 100% security on the internet. However, Flamingo has been designed with privacy in mind and it offers some of the highest guarantees of protection of any personal information you want to use with the app.

• First of all, you do not need any account to use Flamingo, and therefore there is no way for anyone to know what you are selecting and choices you make. In addition, the technologies used by the application mean that almost all the operations that involve your personal information, such as the fact that you want to avoid ingredients x or y, occur on your computer or mobile device, not on some distant server in the cloud, thereby guaranteeing that no one can see them. Finally, it is only if you decide to save your data so that you can later access them from another device that you need to leave a personal email and that your data are stored on a server; even then however, your data are well protected as i) they are encoded by Flamingo, on your computer, before being stored, and ii) the server providers used by Flamingo are located in Europe, thereby ensuring the world's highest level of protection of personal data and privacy.
• Second, Flamingo is provided as a free service by Skintifique, which is a company that commercialises its own skincare products. Unlike most other companies that offer free services and applications, Skintifique makes a living by selling products and serving its clients, and it does not need to "monetize" Flamingo; it has therefore no reason to sell personal data to other companies or marketing agencies - and it does not and will not.

If you have any ideas and suggestions to improve Flamingo, we would be delighted to hear you. Please contact us.

Happy Flamingo searching!