Cleansers are the least glamorous of our skin care products. In over 20 years of helping people have beautiful skin - it’s never about the cleansers. Now, what if I told you in fact this is the most important foundational product you can use in your skin?
Cleansers have the potential to cause a lot of damage. Get cleansing wrong, and your other products will be damage control. Get cleansing right and the rest will fall into place. I’ve been saying this since I created my own skin care line in 2011.
Why Choosing the Right Cleanser Matters for Healthy Skin
Our skin is a highly complex organ with its own continuous processes of repair and rejuvenation. Unlike most of our organs it has to contend with both the inside and the outside world, our body, temperature and humidity, sunlight and darkness, moisture and dryness etc. Add onto that all the products we put on our skin; cleansers, moisturizers, eye creams, serums, lip balms, make-up etc and not to mention treatments like botox, retinols and fillers. Our skin has to adjust and process all these things.
Our skin has a very thin layer on its surface called the acid mantle - pH balanced products focus on this. It is a slightly acid layer, a mix of oils, sweat, enzymes and bacteria. It has one job as a first defense - the acidic nature will kill many foreign bacteria preventing them from penetrating the skin. It also has another job, a very important one sending “messages” to the deeper layers where new cells are being made to tell our skin what it needs. More oil, please. Less oil, please. Faster cell replication to heal this scar, please. White blood cells to clear up this pimple, please - you get the idea. I like to think of it as the brain of our skin, so it can grow, heal and function as it should, all by itself.
What makes cleansers so important for our skin?
Most are made from soaps, detergents and alcohols because these ingredients effectively remove the dirty oils and make-up. However, these ingredients are too effective at their job as they also clean away the acid mantle plus the oils in our living cells, which we want to keep.
Healthy skin can take 6 hours for the acid mantle to be replaced. You are cleaning morning and night, this is very hard for our skin to function as it’s designed, leading to all sorts of skin issues like premature aging, oil imbalances, pimples, acne and sensitivities. I see this all the time in our studio here in Vernon.
The good news is that our skin is very adaptable. If we switch to a cleanser that supports how our skin functions these imbalances and issues often reverse and our skin looks and feels beautiful - just as it should!
At Helena Lane Skincare all of our cleansers are jojoba oil based. This is the only way to effectively clean our skin without destroying the acid mantle and interfering with our skin’s own processes of growth, repair and rejuvenation. It has the most similar fatty acid profile of all the plant oils, helping to nourish our dry or balance oily skin. Don’t forget to remove your cleanser with a cloth and warm water to leave your skin clean, happy and feeling refreshed!
Whatever changes you wish to see with your skin, getting the basics right is the best place to start. Switching to an oil cleanser will likely be the most effective change you can make.
