What do you wash your face with?

DEbest said:
Anyone using Cade face scrub - my local l'occitane are selling it at half price (old stock) but must be used within a year
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Its okay, if you are using the rest of the range i.e.; Cade soap and balm it fits right in there. Make the most of the discount as I wouldn’t pay full price for this as there’s better out there.

Smells nice though.
 
I've found this thread very interesting, as I have recently been thinking about formulating a bar soap especially for the face. I was led to this by smearing my latest shaving soap foam on my face and leaving it for a while to test stability. I was genuinely surprised at how good my skin felt afterwards, as usually, I find soap very drying on the face.

Am I the only person that finds that gels and liquid soaps are very hard to wash off?? I find the same, but less so with most supermarket bar soaps. To me they leave a slimey feel that the water can't seem to easily wash away. I'm definitely a natural bar soap fan. I also wince when I imagine the shelves full of gels in the supermarket transferred to a landfill situation. Totally unnecessary IMHO for a product which is not a nice as old fashioned soap.
 
Actually, nothing...

I shower every day, with hot water only. I use shampoo to wash what little hair I've left. I use homemade soap to wash my hands after using the toilet, during cooking, or tinkering (if I need to remove really tacky grime from my hands, like dirty chain lube, I use something we call garage soap -- like Swarfega). I put shaving soap on my face every day.

That's about it. My understanding is that soap in fact is not good for the skin, necessary sometimes, but preferably used with discretion and moderation. Even lots of hot water can 'dehydrate' the skin. And cleanliness is not the same as degreasing...

Henk
 
soapalchemist said:
I've found this thread very interesting, as I have recently been thinking about formulating a bar soap especially for the face. I was led to this by smearing my latest shaving soap foam on my face and leaving it for a while to test stability. I was genuinely surprised at how good my skin felt afterwards, as usually, I find soap very drying on the face.
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Maybe because a good shaving soap is more than a little like a stearate cream?
 
What exactly is a stearate cream.

I put the good skin feel down to 1)lack of degreasing power of the formula and 2) the addition of extra vegetable glycerine.
 
soapalchemist said:
What exactly is a stearate cream.
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A rather old-fashioned type of vanishing cream, with stearic acid and potassium stearate (made by adding potassium carbonate to the stearic acid to 'saponify' somewhere around 20% of it) as the primary emollient ('oil') and emulsifier... Sort of a self-emulsifying oil phase...

.
I put the good skin feel down to 1)lack of degreasing power of the formula and 2) the addition of extra vegetable glycerine.
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Well, the lack of degreasing power, compared to a normal sodium (cocoate) soap, will certainly offer a different feel. Glycerin may help, although a] too much of a humectant may actually dehydrate skin and b] as stated previously, skin treating ingredients are normally a waste in a soap, which is a rinse-off product. You need to leave it on long enough so that such ingredients have the time to be absorbed by the skin, as in a cream. If you leave a soap on your skin (face) for ten minutes, such ingredients may have some effects in a soap too, but you wouldn't (shouldn't) leave a normal soap on your skin for that long. With a shaving-style soap, this may actually be about OK...

Cheers

Henk
 
Thanks as always for the mine of information, Henk. I've heard that about too much glycerine before, but given the way my foam made my skin feel, I'm hopeful I may have the balance right. You've got me thinking again now about the possibility of using some sort of soap as imulsifier in a lotion. Have to say that my latest experiment is a bit of a disaster....very watery feel, and quite sticky. I'm wondering how much of my c**p lotion disasters my body can absorb???
 
I'm not one for loads of facial scrubs and all that malarkey ..........
for me the only choice is WRIGHTS COAL TAR SOAP.

It's a nice soap to use everyday. Has a great but distinctive fragrance, it's slightly astringent and has antiseptic properties.

Our lass and the kids use some stuff in a bottle with a press down dispenser top but I like the good old Coal Tar!
 
That's a bit of a can of worms actually, Trawlerman. It's not so long since someone here (almost certainly Hunnymonster) pointed out that it's not coal tar soap any more, just soap with an artificial vaguely coal tar aroma. I must say I was bitterly disappointed by the stuff when I got some recently: not the same as it used to be by a long chalk. We spend a lot of our time bemoaning the way good products get reformulated around here.
 
Indeed. I used Wright's Coal Tar soap (carbolic soap) in the 1970s; we used to bring a few bars home with us whenever we went to England (or Wales) for summer holiday, which was almost every year, since my father was an English teacher.
 
There still are a few bar soaps that are worth searching out but most of the good ones have been reformulated even faster than the shaving soaps. Imperial Leather without the tallow is a shadow of the old stuff.
 
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