By Roy, founder Last updated 18/08/2026
A label can look completely honest and still tell you almost nothing. The ingredient is real, the studies behind it are real, and the amount in your tub is a fraction of what those studies used. None of that shows up as a lie. It shows up as a gap between what's printed and what's proven, and most people never go looking for it.
Here's how to check for yourself, in about five minutes with any supplement in your cupboard.
What's a proprietary blend, and why does it matter?
A proprietary blend lists a group of ingredients under one combined weight instead of showing each amount on its own. You'll see something like "Sleep Complex, 1,200 mg" followed by six or seven ingredient names underneath, with no individual numbers attached.
The blend total tells you almost nothing about any single ingredient inside it. The first ingredient listed is usually the biggest share, the last one could be a trace amount, and there's no way to work out which from the label alone. A blend can carry a headline ingredient at a dose that does something, sitting next to four others at doses too small to do anything, and the combined number on the front still looks impressive. We've written a longer breakdown of how these blends work and what questions to ask when you see one, in our piece on proprietary blends explained.
The fix, as a shopper, is simple: if a label won't show you a number next to every ingredient, you can't check the dose against anything. That's the whole problem in one sentence.
Elemental weight versus compound weight: the trick that isn't really a trick
This one catches people because it's not deceptive on purpose, but it's used deceptively often. Minerals like magnesium, zinc and iron are almost never sold in their pure elemental form. They're bound to another compound, because the pure elements aren't stable or absorbable on their own. So a label might say "magnesium glycinate, 730 mg," but that 730 mg includes the glycinate carrier, not just the magnesium. The actual elemental magnesium, the part your body counts toward its daily intake, is a smaller number buried inside that figure.
Different compounds carry wildly different proportions of elemental mineral. A label that quotes the compound weight without stating the elemental amount can look far more generous than it is. We've gone through the actual arithmetic, including the recommended dietary intake and how to work out what a compound number really delivers, in our magnesium RDI breakdown. The short version: always look for the elemental figure, not just the compound one, and if the label only gives you the compound weight, that's worth asking about.
What is fairy dusting?
Fairy dusting is when an ingredient appears on the label at a dose so small it's really there for the ingredient list, not for any effect. The name itself is real, the amount is real, and it just isn't enough. A herbal extract dosed at a tenth of the amount used in the trials that made it famous is a textbook example. It isn't false advertising. It's an ingredient doing marketing work rather than physiological work, and the label alone won't tell you which.
How do you compare a label dose to what's actually been studied?
Once you have the exact amount, in milligrams, for a single ingredient, the comparison is straightforward: look up the dose ranges used in published human research on that ingredient and see where the label number sits. Three rough outcomes:
- At or above the commonly studied range. The label dose is at least in the neighbourhood of what's been tested.
- A fraction of it. The ingredient is present but underdosed relative to the research it's borrowing credibility from.
- No studied range to compare against. Some ingredients are included for taste, texture or tradition rather than any studied effect, and that's a fair reason to include them, as long as it's stated honestly rather than implied to be more.
None of this requires a science background. It requires a number and a search engine. The catch is that you can only run the comparison at all if the label gives you a number in the first place, which loops straight back to the proprietary blend problem above.
Why a full label, every amount, every time, is the honest default
Put those three checks together and the pattern is the same each time: the honest version of a label is the one that gives you a specific number for every single ingredient, with nothing folded into a combined total and no compound weight standing in for the elemental one. It doesn't guarantee every dose is generous. It just means you, or anyone else, can actually check.
That's the standard we hold Settl's own label to. Every ingredient in Settl is printed with its own amount, nothing sits inside a blend, and the doses aren't rounded up to look bigger than the manufacturer's specification allows. Settl is packed in Sydney, in a facility that holds a TGA manufacturing licence. That licence describes the facility, not the product: it isn't a TGA approval of Settl itself, and Settl doesn't hold one.
The tools in this article work on any supplement, not just ours. Run them on whatever's in your cupboard right now and see what the label actually tells you once you go looking. For the wider picture on how Australian labelling rules apply to sleep supplements, the Australian sleep supplement buying guide is the place to start.
One last note: this article explains how labels and doses generally work under Australian food and supplement rules. It isn't legal advice, and if a specific product's compliance matters to you, the label itself or the manufacturer is the source to check.
Cheers, Roy