Editorial

How We Review Products

You should not take a review site’s word for anything without knowing how it is paid and what it refuses to do. This page covers both.

Start with the conflict of interest

Sage Fire is operated by MARIA CRISTINA ROSSI LTDA and funded by affiliate commissions. When we link to a product and you buy it, we get paid. You pay the same price.

That is a real incentive to write favourably, and no disclosure sentence makes it disappear. What we can do is be specific about our method and explicit about limitations, so you have something concrete to check us against rather than a promise of independence.

What we actually assess

1. The label, against the research. We look at what is in the product, at what dose, and whether that dose resembles what studies used. An ingredient present below its studied dose gets treated as decorative.
2. The claims, against the rules. Dietary supplements may make structure/function claims; they may not claim to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. We note when a seller crosses that line.
3. The seller. Named legal entity, reachable contact, findable refund policy, no default auto-shipping.
4. The counterfactual. The question we try to answer is not “is this good?” but “is this better than spending nothing and fixing sleep first?” For a lot of readers, the honest answer is no, and we say so.

What we will not publish

• Invented testimonials. No fabricated customer stories, no purchased reviews, no stock photos captioned as real customers.
• Fake urgency. No countdown timers, no stock counters, no discount that expires and then does not.
• Fake authority. No unnamed “doctors recommend”, no invented institutional endorsements, no implying a study was about a product when it was about one ingredient.
• Disease claims. Not ours, and we flag them when a seller makes them.
• Before-and-after imagery presented as typical results.
• Pages that hide the affiliate relationship. Every affiliate link on this site is labelled, and disclosure sits at the top of the article, not buried in the footer.

Where we are weak

Worth stating plainly:

• We do not run laboratory testing. We read labels and published research; we do not independently assay products.
• We are not clinicians. Where a question needs medical judgement we say so and point to a doctor.
• We write about products we have an affiliate relationship with. We do not claim to survey the entire market.
• Individual variation in supplement response is large. Anything we say about what to expect is general, and may not describe you.

Corrections

Errors get fixed and the page keeps its updated date. If you find one, email [email protected] with the page and the problem.