How to Properly Cleanse Your Skin: A Daily Guide

It seems intuitive how to wash your skin. Water, soap, more water, towel. But cleansing your skin is much more detailed than you would expect! Selecting a cleanser for your skin type, the temperature of water, maintaining the skin’s natural pH, and much more, play key roles in skin health and keep skin problems under control.

How often should you use a cleanser to wash your face? Washing your face is the first and foremost step in skincare. It's so important, it's number one. If you don't clean and wash your face, the rest of your regime will not work properly. That's why you wash your face twice, or even three times a day if you sweat more often, have oily skin, or participate in a sporting activity. This should take 5 minutes at most and doesn't require a lot of specific steps.

Start with splashing some lukewarm water on your face. Then add a small amount of a reliable facial cleanser, like our best-selling Hydrating Foaming Cleanser, or our SkinGlow Enzyme Cleanser, and massage gently into skin, neck, and décolleté. Rinse off with fresh water and pat dry with a clean towel. A clean towel is key to ensure it is actually cleaning your face and not spreading bacteria.

Which brings us to our next point – the temperature of the water you use to wash your face is equally as important as the products you use. Do not wash your face with hot water! Is this actually true? Using lukewarm or cool water can help you prevent premature wrinkles and dry skin. Hot water strips the natural oils of the skin essential in maintaining the natural protective barrier of the skin, so that your skin doesn’t produce too little or too much sebum.

Using cool or lukewarm water also helps you maintain the natural pH of the skin necessary to keep the skin clean, clear, and smooth. It is an important reason why you should avoid using soap as a cleanser.

However, adding a toner can easily help you maintain a positively beneficial pH, and is a great way to cleanse your skin as well. The pH Correcting Toner infuses peptides and bioactive extracts which gently and naturally help to balance the pH of the skin, with the ideal range being between 4-4.5. But remember, a toner is a complement to cleansers, and should not readily replace it.

What about other cleansing details, like removing makeup or exfoliating? These are also essential steps in keeping the skin clean and healthy but have specific nuances as well. Using a makeup remover is not necessary unless you wear makeup that day, and exfoliating should be carried out only 2-3 times a week in order not to strip the skin of its natural protective barrier.

A fantastic exfoliant to add to your skin care cleansing regime should be one that gently exfoliates the surface of the skin, like the Resurfacing Scrub. The glycolic acid present in the cane sugar is a non-abrasive clarifying component which carefully softens the skin.

Your most important takeaways? Cleanse with an effective and professional cleanser to retain your natural pH (remember to skip the soap!), cleanse with cool or lukewarm water to keep skin youthful and smooth, use makeup remover only on makeup-wearing days, and exfoliate with an esteemed exfoliant 2-3 times a week.

So how do the cleansers help your face? Properly cleansing the skin will ensure a clear, radiant, and glowing complexion!