Are You Washing Your Face Wrong?: 10 Tips To Cleanse Properly

November 14, 2013
by Bob Frazier

Cleansing your skin is one of the most important parts of your beauty routine. It’s really the foundation upon which all other treatments build. If you cleanse your skin with the right products and in the right ways, it provides the perfect canvas for all those treatment products that you can’t live without. We had help from Dr. Susan Stuart, M.D., who gave us a lot of the tips, on this one!

1. Don’t Skip Cleansing! Do It Morning And Night!

Sometimes at the end of the day, I’m exhausted and it takes everything I have to get up from my bed or the couch and wash off my makeup from that day. But it’s important, and I can tell a difference after skipping even one night of cleansing. In a Daily Mail experiment, a woman didn’t wash her makeup off for a month, and the effects were crazy; she looks 10 years older. First of all, when you don’t wash your face, all the grub and grime from the day just stays there, clogging your pores and causing damage. But there are other reasons to cleanse.

For one, your skin heats up at night, allowing beneficial ingredients to penetrate better, explained Dr. Jenny Kim, M.D., Ph.D. in a New York Times article. Your blood flow also increases at night, allowing those ingredients to really go to work. And it’s crucial to get a good cleanse in the morning, because healing takes place at night and you’ll have sebum and dead skin cells that you’ll want to slough off for beautiful skin.

2. Wash Your Hands Before Washing Your Face

Ready to fear your own hands? According to the Minnesota Department of Health, there are 1,500 bacteria on each square centimeter of your hand. In a study on college students, researchers found that the average hand contained 150 different types of bacteria (Ohio State University). But don’t let that totally alarm you! Not all bacteria is bad or problematic, but some of it is. Add to the bacteria issue the fact that your hands are full of sweat glands, producing all kinds of oils that can be easily transferred to your face during washing, and you’ve got yourself a less-than-ideal cleansing vehicle.

Sudsing up those grubby little hands of yours before you cleanse can help to ensure that you’re getting the best clean possible. Use soap and warm water, and wash your hands for 20 seconds before rinsing them off. Now, you’ve got the proper tools for a good face wash.

3. Wet Your Face First

There’s an interesting rumor out there that you should apply cleanser to dry skin. As Dr. Stuart points out, “Most of these products are aggressive and should be mitigated by water.” Since they’re using some serious surfactants — even if it’s not the dreaded sodium lauryl sulfate — you’ll want to make sure you have wetted your face. This also allows the product to spread out more evenly over your skin, meaning you can use less.

The one exception to this? If you do a double cleanse and use an oil cleanser, like DHC Deep Cleansing Oil ($24.99, amazon.com) (a personal favorite), you’ll want to apply that to dry skin or use it in the way suggested on the packaging. This is particularly helpful if you have oily skin, since the “like dissolves like” property of chemistry means that the oil will help to get rid of the excess oil on your skin before you cleanse.

4. Use Lukewarm and Cool Water, Not Hot and Cold Water

I’ve personally never been a fan of extremes, and washing my face is no exception. A little warmth can help to soften skin, allowing for easy exfoliation and better permeation of ingredients (this is particularly true if you’re washing your face during or after a shower) (Under My Skin). But going too hot completely strips the skin’s natural lipids, and worse still, it can “shock” the skin and cause capillaries to burst, causing varicose veins on the face, according to Dr. Stuart. And while cool water can help keep your pores from producing excess oil, going to cold can be an unwelcome shock that does your skin no good, according to Dr. Mary Lupo.

5. Pick A Gentle Cleanser

I sometimes have the urge to just exfoliate the bejesus out of my face. I mean, I’m the kind of person who likes to be able to see change happening. The first time I used glycolic acid, I thought, “Well, this might as well be Elmer’s Glue, because it feels completely useless.” But I was clearly being ridiculous, because after I rinsed the peel off, my skin felt amazing. It felt way better than any time I’d used a harsh scrub. So, skip things like the St. Ives Apricot Scrub, which has pieces of apricot shell so jagged that they can actually rip and stretch at pores if you’re too rough.

Here’s the thing: You don’t need to scrape off your skin to get the dirt off. And you definitely don’t need harsh surfactants to get clean. When you’re picking out a cleanser, remember that the skin on your face is delicate, and then think about how a cleanser can benefit you. I’m definitely a fan of our new cleanser, FutureDerm Skin Reborn Facial Cleanser ($39), which contains SiQube®, shown in independent studies to improve the skin barrier. After our designer Meredith had been using it for a while (she got the sample first, lucky girl!), she said she was amazed how soft her skin felt.

If you want to exfoliate manually, try something with round beads or a muslin cloth. Or, you can use a gentle cleanser with my favorite little tool, the Clarisonic Mia Sonic Skin Cleansing System ($125, amazon.com).

6. Work In Cleanser For A Full MINUTE

Using cleanser for less than a minute doesn’t allow the beneficial ingredients to bind to the skin and work to their full capacity, according to Dr. David E. Bank in the January 2008 issue of Health magazine. That means if you’re only sudsing up for 30 seconds, then you’re doing your skin an injustice. My honest-to-goodness trick for this is to count “One Mississippi, two Mississippi…” until I reach “60 Mississippi,” so that I can make sure I’ve really washed my face for a whole, entire minute.

7. Don’t Miss You Hairline, Neck, And The Sides Of Your Nose!

Remember in old-timey movies when moms scrubbed behind their kids’ ears in the bath, because they knew they’d missed them? There’s a good chance that you’re missing certain parts of your face when you’re cleansing. The common areas are your hairline, neck, and the sides of your nose. These places are, unfortunately, places that have it rough. All the products you use in your hair and the sebum from your scalp can create a recipe for zits on your hairline. The neck is simply a place that a lot of people miss, but it gets the same dirt and sweat as your face. Finally, in a cursory clean, it’s easy to miss the sides of your nose, but it’s important to get in there are it’s an oily place that can cause acne issues if not properly cleaned.

8. Give It A REALLY Good Rinse

Rise off your cleanser, and then rise again. Your cleanser is meant to get washed down the drain, not to stay too long on your skin. Dr. Stuart points out, “If you don’t wash out cleansing product, it will dry out your skin and clog pores.” Ingredients like cleansing surfactants can be great for a quick clean, but will strip your skin of moisture if left on too long. That’s why it’s super important to use cool water to rinse it off.

9. Don’t Get Rough With Drying — And Keep It Clean!

You know what has a ton of bacteria on it? The hand towel hanging by your sink for anyone to use. Ideally, towels should be washed once a week at a high temperature to avoid them becoming cess pools of germs, which would be a shame after all that work for clean skin (Daily Mail). The other thing? You’ve been gentle with that epidermis up until this point, so don’t start using rough towels now. It’s important to pick a soft towel and to pat, not rub, your skin dry.

10. Always Moisturizer After

This should be a no-brainer! After you wash your face, you’ve gotten rid of the natural moistuizers, so you need to replace those. In addition, you’ll get all the benefits of the awesome ingredients in many of them. What moisturizer you choose depends on what you need, but even if you have super oily skin, you’ll want to make sure you use one.

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