How to specify ingredients in Schema.org (other than recipes or drugs)?

Question

I'd like to use Schema.org for a series of product specs pages.

The products are cosmetics (shampoos, creams, etc.) and ideally an INCI declaration will be included for every product.

I'd like to use Schema.org in the declaration, but I cannot find a suitable category in Schema.org. Ingredients is meant for cooking recipes, and ActiveIngredient for (medical) drugs and dietary supplements.

Did I overlook some part of the tree? Any ideas for a workaround? Or am I trying to do something out of scope?

Answer 1

You could use the product schema class for each product, and then specify the INCI's using an additional (custom) property for each one, for example if your shampoo had Shea Butter and Water as ingredients (clearly I'm no expert on cosmetics!):

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <img itemprop="image" src="shampoo123.jpg" alt="" />
  <span itemprop="name">Shampoo Product Name</span>
  <div itemprop="additionalProperty" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PropertyValue">
      <span itemprop="name">Ingredient</span>:
      <span itemprop="value">Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter)</span>
      <meta itemprop="identifier" content="Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter)"/>
      <meta itemprop="description" content="Shea Butter"/>
      <meta itemprop="propertyID" content="INCI"/>
  </div>
  <div itemprop="additionalProperty" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PropertyValue">
      <span itemprop="name">Ingredient</span>:
      <span itemprop="value">Aqua (Water)</span>
      <meta itemprop="identifier" content="Aqua (Water)"/>
      <meta itemprop="description" content="Water"/>
      <meta itemprop="propertyID" content="INCI"/>
  </div>
</div>

Beyond this if you wanted a specific schema for your cosmetic products you could:

(a) create your own schema extension for your requirements, or

(b) propose and contribute a new descendant of Product such as CosmeticProduct

Answer 2

By the way, an interesting observation. HTML markup is the best option. Schema.org is a recommendation for the search engine so that Google can better understand what kind of content you have on the page. But if your code is clean, and you use lists or a table, then Google will easily pull it into a snippet. I made a test site with recipes. no micromarking at all, just good and correct HTML code. As a result, my snippets were exactly the same as the snippets that have micro-markup.

Answer 3

GoogleWebmasterTools has a tool about that, please see the image and ask another question if you need help: