Why cleansing is the foundation of good facial skincare: experts give their tips on the best products and routines to use
- Choose a cleanser that’s right for your skin type and for what you need to remove – be it sweat, sunscreen, or environmental pollutants
- Consider doing a double cleanse in the evening, say celebrity facialist Melanie Grant and Lucy Shaw, skincare education manager for a beauty retailer
Here are some times I’ve stopped and wondered whether I’ve been washing my face properly: when I read that Gwyneth Paltrow, patron saint of glowing skin, only splashes her face with water in the mornings and when I watched a viral Instagram Reel of a dermatologist using a face wipe to remove foundation off a satsuma mandarin.
In the clip, Dr Tijion Esho shows how much residual make-up is left after using a wipe. And while, as Esho notes, our faces aren’t pieces of citrus fruit, it’s a good reminder of the importance of cleansing your face properly. Wipes are generally best kept for travel, very late nights or those particularly lazy moments when doing something is probably better than nothing.
“[W]hat many watching don’t realise is that the surface of the skin actually has several grooves and pits that we can’t see with the naked eye – it also has many oils and lipids that can act like the waxy surface of the orange – the video represents what can happen at a microscopic level and should be food for thought,” the doctor wrote in the video caption.
“Repeated wipes would cause further microtears microscopically leaving make-up in existing and newly formed microscopic ‘grooves’ but with the naked eye would appear clean.”
Celebrity skin whisperer Melanie Grant, who has salons in Australia and the United States and who has tended to the (luminous) skin of model Lara Worthington, actress Phoebe Tonkin and more, is similarly wary of wipes.