Snehal Maheshwari

I write and maintain the ingredient and allergen content on AllerNote — the ingredient encyclopedia, the Learn articles, and the explanations attached to every scan result.

I am a software engineer, not a dermatologist, and that distinction shapes everything published here. AllerNote does not diagnose, does not rank products by a generic safety score, and does not tell anyone to stop following clinical advice. What it does is the reading: matching an ingredient list against allergens you already know about, synonyms and cross-reactors included. The medicine stays with your dermatologist.

AllerNote began with my own patch-test result — a printout of chemical names and a single instruction to avoid them — and the discovery that matching that list against an INCI label by eye in a pharmacy aisle is close to impossible. Everything on this site is built around that specific problem.

How this content is researched

Ingredient and allergen entries are grounded in published sources rather than generated from a model's own knowledge: the American Contact Dermatitis Society, the EU CosIng database and Annex III restricted-substances list, and the peer-reviewed contact-dermatitis literature. Our editorial policy sets out the sourcing, review, and update process in full, including how AI is used and where it is not permitted to make a call.

Elsewhere

I write about the engineering behind this — grounded LLM agents, tool-calling architecture, and autonomous operational systems — at snehalmaheshwari.com.

Corrections and sourcing questions are welcome: [email protected]