Gentle Daily Face Wash

Details

A low-foam gel cleanser for normal to combination skin. It lifts sweat, sunscreen and city dust and then stops. Ten ingredients, and every one of them is on this page with a number beside it. There are three cheats in a face wash and this one denies all three by printing figures instead of adjectives. The first is pH. Skin's own surface sits between 4.7 and 5.75, slightly acidic, and that acidity is what keeps the barrier enzymes working and the resident bacteria in balance. A true soap cannot be made below about pH 9, and a bar or a syndet at pH 9 to 10 swells the corneocytes, strips the lipids and leaves the face tight and squeaking, which the market has spent forty years teaching people to read as clean. Almost nobody prints the number. This one is built at 5.5 and it is measured on every lot. The second is the word gentle attached to a sulphate base. The third is fragrance, which is legally allowed to appear as one word, parfum, covering anything from three components to sixty, and which is the commonest cause of a contact reaction in a rinse-off product. This wash has none at all, not even an essential oil put in to let the word natural onto the front. This is one of three washes on this shelf and they exist as three because three covers everyone. Normal to combination skin buys this one. Dry, tight or reactive skin should buy the cream face wash instead, which barely foams. Oily and breakout-prone skin should buy the clarifying wash, which carries salicylic acid at 1 percent. Nobody needs a fourth.

• Full INCI, in descending order: Aqua, Coco-Glucoside, Lauryl Glucoside, Glycerin, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice, Phenoxyethanol, Xanthan Gum, Allantoin, Ethylhexylglycerin, Citric Acid
• With percentages: Coco-Glucoside 12.0, Lauryl Glucoside 6.0, Glycerin 4.0, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice 2.0, Phenoxyethanol 0.7, Xanthan Gum 0.4, Allantoin 0.2, Ethylhexylglycerin 0.1, Citric Acid to pH, and Aqua is the balance at 74.6
• The 1 percent line falls after the aloe. Everything below it may legally be listed in any order, so we mark where it falls rather than letting the order imply a dose
• Measured pH 5.5, on every lot, against skin's own 4.7 to 5.75
• Sulphate-free, and here is what replaced what: no SLS and no SLES, and the job is done by two alkyl polyglucosides made from coconut and corn sugar at about 9 percent active surfactant in total. A free-from claim with no replacement named is an empty claim
• Preservative-free is not a claim we will make, because an unpreserved water-based product in an Indian bathroom is a microbiology problem, not a purity story. It is phenoxyethanol at 0.7 percent with ethylhexylglycerin at 0.1 percent, which is under the 1.0 percent ceiling. Paraben-free preserved with methylisothiazolinone would be a downgrade, so there is no MIT and no CMIT here either
• Fragrance-free means fragrance-free: no parfum, no essential oil, no masking fragrance, and none of the 26 components the EU makes declarable
• No dyes, no mineral oil, no alcohol denat, no plastic microbeads, no exfoliating acid of any kind
• Honest trade-off one: about 9 percent active surfactant is a low-foam level. It will not produce the thick meringue lather a sulphate gives, and if lather is how you judge a wash, you will think this one is not working
• Honest trade-off two: fragrance-free means it smells of its own ingredients, which is a faint slightly sweet note from the glucosides. It is not unpleasant and it is not nothing
• Honest trade-off three: at pH 5.5 with no acids in it, this wash removes sweat, sunscreen and oil. It does not remove long-wear make-up, and scrubbing at it will do more harm than a second cleanse would