A glowing skin is everyone’s dream today. Men have joined the bandwagon too. Most bathroom cabinets are filled with bottles of skincare creams, lotions, and gels. It’s a jungle out there, and you’re spoiled for choice. You spend thousands every month, or every two months, on various OTC and nutraceutical skincare products. There can be some hits and some misses. But most often, the success of any skincare ritual lies in its first step – cleansing. Not just cleansing, but deep cleansing!
The first secret to glowing skin is deep cleansing, and if it’s to be effective, one round of water cleansing is never enough to draw out the deeply embedded impurities and sebum. Not many are aware of this fact and hence pay less attention to it.
Every type of skin, every type of problem skin, needs deep cleansing. Treating skin issues begins with deep cleansing.
At Astrea, we have developed a set of cleansers that leave the skin thoroughly cleansed and mildly exfoliated, leaving it radiant.
What Is Deep Cleansing?
Deep cleansing is nothing but double cleansing. It starts out with using an oil cleanser, followed by a face wash. Yes, you need two different formulas to thoroughly cleanse the face.
At Astrea, we’ve added an almost magical formulation—cleansing grains—that very gently exfoliate, leaving the skin clearer, brighter, and radiant. You can do this regime twice a day: once in the morning in the shower and just before you go to bed at night.
Step 1 - Oil Cleanser
Why Oil Cleansers?
Even for oily skin. Surprised?
Because oil dissolves oil! Natural oils pre-exist in our skin, either as sebum or those left behind from topical applications. No matter what type your skin is, cleansing oils mix with these ‘not-so-good’ oils and draw them out—something that water-based cleansers cannot do, because oil and water do not mix!
Secondly, oils in the cleansers bind to surface impurities, pulling out the dirt without clogging pores.
Third in point – oil cleansers help retain our skin’s natural pH balance, which water-based cleansers cannot.
Oil cleansing is not a modern concept. It’s an age-old practice that got diluted when pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies started misleading us by promoting surfactant-laden cleansers to grow their businesses.
The damage caused by chemicals allowed them to promote related products that they promised would replace the lost oils and balance the skin. Here, we are saying ‘don’t lose the oils in the first place.’ Go the natural way. Be naturally you!
Step 2 - Face Wash
After the oil cleansing, you need to remove the residual oil on the skin, and a face wash does exactly that. It also draws out water-based debris such as sweat and the dislodged dirt from the skin. A word of caution – choose your foam cleanser wisely, one that has as few chemicals as possible. Any product that lathers contains loads of surfactants, which dry out the skin by stripping it of its natural oils. Squeaky clean is a myth; more foam is not always better! We would recommend aiming for healthy clean instead – cleansing, without losing the skin’s natural pH balance.
Step 3 – Glow Facial Scrub
The next step after oil and face wash is exfoliation, which removes dead skin cells and debris from the skin.
Glow Facial Scrub – Mild Cleansing Grains contains Kaolin clay, colloidal oats (powdered oats), and crushed rose petals. Kaolin clay and colloidal oats very gently exfoliate and relieve the skin of any dead skin cells that may be sticking to it despite the above-described double cleansing. With every passing year, the quality and texture of our skin change, and it loses its capacity to shed dead cells on its own. This is where cleansing grains step in.
Rose petals contain natural oils and sugars that lock moisture into dry skin cells and give them a rejuvenated look. Glow Facial Scrub doubles up as a daily face wash and an exfoliator. It can be used even twice a day, every day since it contains zero chemicals. Also, the grains are soft and mild.
So, this 3-step deep cleansing should be done morning and night.
We hope we’ve taken you through the nuances of deep cleansing, and it’s now time to make informed choices. As we said earlier, there is a plethora of choice out there, and we hope to help you zero in on choosing the right natural face cleansers.
