Temperatures are getting warmer, sun rays less shy, buds are peeping out in the trees and gardens are blooming: yes, spring is here! With the big cleanings going with it, from the bottom of your wardrobes… to the pores of your skin! Cleansing, getting rid of impurities, refining texture, eliminating the dead cells accumulated for a week, a month or… sometimes the whole winter (!), refreshing complexion: this season marks the time for spring exfoliation, but it is better to do it on your face the way it should be done. Here are the right gestures, some advice, and the scrub selection by the experts at Cosmetic OBS-L’Observatoire des Cosmétiques.
The right scrub
In the cosmetics industry, two main techniques are known to scrub – or exfoliate – the skin, depending on the type of actives used.
Keratolytic agents
(almost) do not require any rubbing, merely the application of products which act on the skin’s keratin to eliminate dead cells. This is the rule of fruit acids or salicylic acid…
On the contrary,
abrasive agents
involve a massage and operate (relatively speaking, of course!) the same way as emery paper on a wall to be sanded down.
They can appear in the form of perfectly regular microbeads (synthetic, such as in polyethylene, or natural, such as in jojoba), or of powder (micronized particles, i.e. reduced to the size of about a micron) of hard natural compounds (fruit kernel, bark, pips, grains, crystals…). The latter are less homogeneous, and can therefore contain a few sharp splinters that can prove rather aggressive and which the fragile, often sensitive epidermis of the face may not really welcome… if the abrasive agents are not softened with emollient, smoothing and/or soothing actives that can compensate for the inevitably “scouring”, possibly irritating scrubbing gesture.
In any case, a good scrub formula obviously should not allow for …
