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Reading labels

A Named List Is Not a Proprietary Blend, and the Difference Matters

By the MemoHoney Team at Memohonee · Published 2026-09-21 · Last updated 2026-11-04 · Health review by Dr. Renee Schwartz, ND

Two different label failures, frequently confused

There are two ways a supplement label can leave you unable to work out what you are buying, and they are not the same thing. Almost every article about supplement transparency treats them as one, which muddles a useful distinction.

The first is a proprietary blend. The ingredients are listed, a single total mass is given for all of them together, and no individual amount appears. This is a deliberate construction, permitted by the regulations, and it exists so that a formula can be listed without revealing its recipe. It also means a blend can be ninety-five per cent of the cheapest ingredient and the label will look identical to one that is not.

The second is a label with no quantitative panel at all. Nothing is concealed by construction; the information simply is not on the artwork supplied. That is what this particular product has, and it is a different problem with different consequences.

This article is about the difference, because a buyer who understands it can read any label in this aisle considerably faster.

What a proprietary blend actually hides

Picture a blend listed at 750 mg containing eight botanical extracts, in descending order of weight. What can you establish? That the first ingredient is the largest and the last is the smallest. That is all.

The first could be 700 mg and the remaining seven could share 50 mg between them. That arrangement is entirely legal, it is consistent with the label as printed, and it is common enough to have its own name in the trade. The practice is sometimes called label dressing: expensive, well-known ingredients listed in quantities too small to do anything, present so their names can appear.

The defence offered is competitive: a full disclosure lets a rival copy the formula. That argument has some force for a genuinely novel formulation and very little for a blend of eight extracts anybody could guess, and it is made a great deal more often than it is earned.

Rows two and three are frequently described in the same words and they are genuinely different. A blend conceals by construction; a missing panel omits by supply.

Which of the two this label is

MemoHoney's artwork names six ingredients: L-Arginine, L-Arginine AKG 2:1 Extract, L-Citrulline HCL, L-Citrulline Malate, Niacin and Beta-Alanine. There is no blend name, no combined total and no proprietary wrapper. There is also no Supplement Facts panel anywhere in the supplied pack, so there is no amount for anything.

It is the third row of the table: a named list with no panel. That places it somewhere specific on the transparency scale, and the position is worth being accurate about rather than lumping it in with the worst case.

What a named list gives you is real. You can look each compound up. You can find its literature, its safety profile and its interactions. You can check whether anything on the list is a compound you already take, react badly to or have been told to avoid. None of that is possible with a blend called something like Cognitive Matrix.

What a named list rules out

The most useful property of a named list is negative, and it is rarely stated.

A survey of cognitive-enhancement supplements found an unapproved prescription drug in products sold on the ordinary market. That is the serious end of what goes wrong in this category, and it happens behind labels that either conceal their contents or misstate them.

A label naming six ordinary, well-characterised compounds is a label whose risks can be reasoned about. Every one of the six here appears in the published literature under its own name, with a known safety profile: beta-alanine has a systematic risk assessment, niacin has a published upper intake level, and the arginine and citrulline literature runs to hundreds of human trials. None of that is true of a blend you cannot see into.

• Every ingredient can be looked up individually
• Interactions can be checked against anything you are already taking
• Nothing on the list is a compound with an obscure or contested safety record
• An unfamiliar ingredient name would be a warning sign, and there are none here
• What remains unknown is quantity, and quantity alone

What it leaves open, and what to do about it

Quantity is not a small remainder. It is the difference between an ingredient doing something and an ingredient being present, and on this label it applies to all six names at once.

The partial answer this site uses is to print the other half of the comparison. If the label cannot tell you how much citrulline is in a capsule, it can at least be set beside the 8.8 grams a day that the cerebrovascular trial used, and beside the twelve grams a day of the arginine alpha-ketoglutarate kinetic study. A reader with both numbers can draw their own line; a reader with neither cannot.

The complete answer is to ask. A seller with a telephone order desk can be asked what is in a capsule, and this one can be reached on the order line at the foot of this page. The answer is information and so is the absence of one. Ask before buying rather than after, because before is when the answer can still change your decision.

A transparency scale, from best to worst

Ranking the possibilities makes it easier to place any bottle quickly, and it also makes clear how much room there is above a named list as well as below it.

1. A full panel, plus a released certificate of analysis for the lot. The amounts are stated and somebody has measured them. This is the top of the scale and it is rare in this aisle.
2. A full panel with amounts, no certificate. You know what the label claims and you are trusting that the bottle matches it. This is the ordinary good case.
3. A full panel where the amounts are small. Disappointing, and still better than not knowing: a small printed number is information and lets you do the comparison against the literature yourself.
4. A named list with no panel. Every ingredient can be looked up and none can be quantified. This is where the product discussed here sits.
5. A proprietary blend. A total and a rank order, with no individual amount. One ingredient may account for nearly all of it.
6. A blend with a trademarked name and no ingredient list at all. The bottom of the scale, and the place where analytical surveys find things nobody put on the label.

Two observations follow from that ordering. The first is that the top of the scale is achievable: publishing a panel and releasing a certificate costs a manufacturer very little beyond the testing it should already be doing, and any product that does it deserves the credit. The second is that the distance between position four and position five is larger than it looks, because a named list preserves every safety question while a blend does not.

The conclusion is not that a named list is good enough. It is that the two failures are different, that this one is the less serious of them, and that being accurate about which is which makes a reader harder to mislead. The ingredients page carries all six names with their trial amounts, and the label guide turns the method above into seven questions.