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How BOST Tests
Every product on this site faces the same examination: eight sensory axes, a check of manufacturers claims, and one of three verdict scores
Framework v1. First published August 2026. Every product bought at full price, none gifted.
Most reviews hand you a single score. A star rating averages smell, feel, sound, and pressure into one number, which is precisely the information a sensory-sensitive reader needs kept apart. This site doesn’t average. Same test, every time.
One examination, applied the same way every time
Noise, scent, tactile, proprioceptive, interoception, visual, hygiene, social. Scored separately, never blended.
Each packaging claim written down first, then tested and marked against what the investigation found.
Cleared, Caution, Flagged. No stars, no numbers, no ranking.
The same eight axes travel from shampoo to earplug to headphone, so findings stay comparable.
Every product is bought at full price. Nothing is gifted, and no verdict is for sale.
The eight sensory axes
Sensory distress is usually a mismatch, not raw intensity. A product fails because it behaves differently under heat, pressure, or time, contradicts its label, or changes character from one room to the next. The eight axes exist to catch each way that can happen. One row per way.
| Axis | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Noise | Sound the product introduces or fails to control: hiss, occlusion, own-voice boom, packaging crackle. |
| Scent | Fragrance cold, warm, and at shower temperature, and whether it lingers after use. |
| Tactile | External surface contact: skin, tongue, residue, drag, squeak on rinse. |
| Proprioceptive | Pressure, fullness, the sense of a seal, and entrapment, tracked over time rather than at first fit. |
| Interoception | Internal signals the product amplifies or mutes: heartbeat, breathing, pulse, the sound of your own chewing. |
| Visual | Packaging contrast and clutter, and on electronics, LEDs, indicators, and screen animation. |
| Hygiene | How clean it stays across repeated use: wax pickup, residue, whether it wipes down. |
| Social | Other people as compound sensory sources, and the social cost of being seen to wear the thing. |
An axis only reports when there’s something to report. Visual usually stands down for an earplug, scent stands down for hardware, and the seal-related axes stand down for a shampoo. A blank axis is a finding too: it means nothing there gave trouble.
How claims get checked
Before a product is tested, every claim it makes gets written down. Not just the headline “fragrance-free”, but everything on the box, the website, and the marketing copy. Each claim is then tested and marked against what the investigation found. That comparison sits at the top of every review, above the scorecard. First thing you see, for a reason.
Some claims can be tested directly. Others are vague in a way that resists testing at all: “dermatologically tested” says nothing about what was tested, under what conditions, or with what result. Those get noted as untestable rather than waved through.
Worked example. Claim: “fragrance-free”. Tested cold, warm, and in shower-temperature steam. Finding: no scent cold, a faint sweet note once the water ran hot. A claim that holds on the shelf and breaks in the shower is exactly what this format is built to catch.
What the verdicts mean
Stars average out things that can’t be averaged. A product that’s excellent on scent and a problem on touch isn’t a three-star product; it’s right for one sensitivity and wrong for another. So the site uses three words instead, each scoped to the profile it was tested against. No score to average the detail away.
| Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|
| ✓ | Cleared. No significant sensory problem for the profile being tested against. A sound starting point for most people who share it. |
| – | Caution. One or more issues under specific conditions. This verdict needs reading, not just seeing; the review says exactly what, and when. |
| ✗ | Flagged. A claim doesn’t hold, or a sensory problem is serious enough to warn against, for a stated profile. Not a blanket condemnation. |
A product can be Cleared on one axis and Flagged on another, both at once. The headline verdict is a summary. The breakdown underneath is the thing worth reading.
One test, every category
The axes don’t change when the product does. A shampoo, an earplug, and a pair of headphones are all scored on the same eight dimensions and run through the same claims check. That consistency is what makes the findings comparable, and it’s what lets the site say things a single-score review can’t.
A shampoo can be genuinely fragrance-free and still fail on tactile grounds. A headphone can cancel noise beautifully and fail on proprioception by the forty-minute mark. Same framework, different failure, both stated plainly. Copycats can lift the words. The system, the evidence, and the cross-category record are harder to borrow.
The methodologies, category by category
Each investigation publishes its own methodology in full: the exact tones, timings, proxies, and environments behind the verdicts. The framework above is constant. These pages are where it meets the specifics of a product type.
New categories join on the same framework. Same eight axes, every category. Nothing gets a bespoke scoring system invented for it.
This framework is versioned. When the axes, the claims format, or the verdict definitions change, the version and date at the top of this page change with them.