For Men (or Women as well), the best way...or we should say, the recommended and most effective way, to wash your face without adding any additional issues or stress to your skin, is this short step by step process:
- Use warm water to cleanse your face, whether in the shower or at the sink
- Ensure the face wash you use is gentle, has non-comedogenic ingredients and is meant for your face (not a body wash or something else)
- Please see below for a reference on non-comedogenic and what's found most commonly in Men's face washes.
- If you have a beard, feel free to do a second wash depending on how much beard hair you have, really get the lather in there, but avoid scratching, just use your meaty portion of the fingers or palms
- Rinse using warm water, rinse about 2-3 times or more to really get everything rinsed off
- Now change your temperature to COLD, as cold as it goes,
- Don't touch any towels, tools, oil's, bottles, etc at this point
- And yep, rinse your face with the cold water. Splash your face a few times ensuring the cold water gets from foreheard, by the ear's, past the apex of your cheeks into your neck and past your chin into your neck.
- What this process does is opens pores, clean's the face and clears everything out. Warm is necessary to not damage the skin (too hot and it will dry out your skin and it can cause damage to your face skin. Face skin is thinner and more sensitive than other area's of your body, so it's easier to damage). After rinsing with the warm water (you rinse with warm water because if you jump to cold at this point, you may be closing up pores with soap/dirt/oil's lather mix, so you want to get it rinsed as best as possible. The cold water will close up the pores. Cold water is better to resist over drying as well.
- At this point, you can apply a non-comedogenic face lotion.
- See our other pages for what non-comedogenic means, especially for Men and how to prevent acne, dryness, irritation and itchiness!
- Most common comedogenic ingredients found in Men's face wash (and many skin care products):
- Coconut and Palm oil.
- Unless its gone through some sort of refining process or saponification; Coconut and palm are high on the comedogenic scale, this means it contributes to causing ACNE and can be over-drying and cause irritation/redness/itching. This is exasperated more-so for those with sensitive skin.
- There are many other comedogenic ingredient's used in skin care/personal care/cosmetic type products.