Before I begin, I feel compelled to explain some details about myself as a beauty nerd. Pre-pandemic, one of my favorite things to do was to walk into a Sephora or a department store and pick out something I had read about or seen on Instagram (I’m not really an in-person browser). I liked the tactility of trying out the tester, the weight of the thing in the shopping bag after I purchased it, the security of knowing it was, in fact, exactly what I wanted. Buying it—sometimes I did, other times I didn’t—always felt like the solution even though it isn’t and shouldn’t be. I also love unboxing things and when that genre of video was created, it felt as though the Internet had captured a secret part of myself that I didn’t realize other people possessed, too.
John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–6.
Today, I want to write about gentle cleansers because my skin has changed a lot in the last year. I’m now working from home and no longer wear any makeup. I don’t go outside as much as I should. I’ve become partial to taking baths and thus shower less frequently. I’m cooking more for myself and eating less processed food. I wash my hands all the time. And so my skin—which used to be combination (oily on the nose, forehead, chin, with the occasional hormonally-timed breakout; with sun spots and uneven patches acquired after the UV damage of spring and summer)—has now become much more self-regulating. Its only enemy right now is New York City’s dry winter air and the suffocating heat generated by our pre-war building that turns our apartment into a sauna. I began craving a morning cleanser that would feel silk soft, like flower petals against my skin, that washed it but didn’t strip it (what is it with the word “strip” in beauty?) of its own oils but still removed the heavy moisturizing mask or sticky serum (will get to those in another newsletter) applied the night before. With such a preamble, here are three of the gentlest (and clean and sustainable) cleansers I’ve tried and loved:
Pai’s Middlemist Seven: Camellia & Rose Gentle Cream Cleanser + Dual Flyer Cloth, $29-$59
I discovered Pai last year and have become something of an evangelist for this UK-based beauty brand. Its founder, Sarah Brown, started Pai because she was tired of using products that promised themselves as “organic” and “hypoallergenic” but contained irritating and synthetic ingredients that caused her skin to react poorly. I tried one of the brand’s free online beauty consultations and loved every second of it (I said I wanted a simple routine, but then had questions about every product; they’re quite well-known for their rose hip oil). I love everything about this cleanser, from its consistency, to the shape of the bottle, to the pump, to how the lid stays on when you travel with it. It possesses Camellia oil, which is ultra hydrating. This is a very superficial detail, but the cleanser comes with a little washcloth that the brand calls the “Twin Flyer cloth,” which I love to use (one side is smoother than the other, just toss it in with your laundry each week). You’re supposed to massage the cleanser into your dry skin and then gently wash it off with the damp cloth. But sometimes I forget to do that and wet my face first. Either seems just fine. It has a very pleasant rose scent, like how I imagine sleeping on a bed of fallen clouds in a plot of wild roses would be if it was very clean and comfortable (I’m envisioning the magical garden in Shirin Neshat’s brilliant film Women Without Men).
Symbiome’s The Renewal Daily Cleanser, $60
Symbiome is a San Francisco-based minimalist beauty brand, which is a new concept to me, but there’s an emerging idea in beauty that we use way too many products to begin with, which have way too many different ingredients that assault our skin and the result does more harm than good. For this cleanser, Symbiome whittled down their ingredients list to just seven items and though I’ve never had a problem with the “more is more” edict in beauty, I have heard enough horror stories of crazy breakouts from switching routines and being overzealous about products to believe that minimalism might be a good idea in this department. I’m also a sucker for smart marketing and everything about Symbiome feels smart (the founders, Larry Weiss and Vicki Levine, work with microbiome scientists but I don’t quite understand all the science, sorry!) and about loving your skin because you’re a beautiful human being and not because you need to feel beautiful. This cleanser operates with a similar concept: rub it onto your dry face first then gently wash it off. It’s more a gel than a cream, and the scent is very calming. For some reason—and I don’t think this has any relation to the ingredients—using it makes me think of how Christmas smells in the Bay Area, California, where I grew up: cool, dewy air blended with the smell of citrus.
Ayond’s Metamorph Cleansing Balm, $80
This balm was a hand me down, so I don’t know as much about Ayond but apparently it is inspired by the beauty secrets of the desert and its founders, Porter Yates and Shani van Breukelen, split their time between Santa Fe and Brooklyn. I enjoy that it comes in a pot (like a salve) and I find the texture (it feels milky but also a bit like fatty soap or coconut lotion, in a good way) and smell (lightly soapy, with a hint of sage) incredibly pleasing. I’ve taken to rubbing half a teaspoon or so over my face when I’m in the shower, leaving it on for a beat and then washing it off. (I’ve been warned that one shouldn’t wash your face in the shower because the water gets too hot, so I sometimes do a slightly demented thing of holding the shower water in my cupped hands until it is a little less hot and then washing my face with it.) Apparently, you can also leave it on your face as a kind of mask (or, according to their website, use it for gua sha or as aftershave), and it does feel slippery enough for that, but I have only used it as a cleanser. If you like to burn Palo Santo in your home, you will probably like this brand.
Here, I feel the need to proclaim that I am a total amateur in the realm of beauty! I think part of what you’re paying for with the above are the extra efforts some of these brands make to work with sustainable and well-sourced ingredients and eco-certified labs, as well as the significant research and development that goes into avoiding synthetics and irritants that define the ambiguous term “clean” beauty. They also pay attention to packaging (all recycled paper, few or no plastic wrappers), though no one has quite solved the issue of bottle waste or reuse. For a more affordable option, there’s always Cetaphil, which clean beauty people will freak out about, but it has been a reliable default of mine over the years. I often buy a baby bottle when I travel (and yes, traveling isn’t a thing right now but I want write about traveling).
John Singer Sargent’s A Nude Boy on the Beach, 1878, painted after Sargent’s trip to Naples and Capri.
Otherwise, I am late to this, but the opening line to Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults (translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions) is crazy good: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” Damn! It’s a dramatic introduction—like all things Ferrante—into explaining a daughter’s adoration for her father, and how your father is, in many ways, your first admirer, your first love. She goes on:
I loved my father very much.…I had much more fun with him than with my mother. He always wanted something of mine, my ear, my nose, my chin: they were so perfect, he said, he just couldn’t live without them. I loved that tone, which proved to me over and over again how indispensable I was to him.
The story of how the purity of such admiration becomes corrupted, is of course, why Ferrante is so brilliant. It’s a story that begins with the narrator’s adolescence and the arrival of puberty—and many dramatic events happen that I won’t give away—but I love the way she frames the beginning of the novel with this tender relationship between daughter and father. Reading Ferrante again has made me think a lot about how I began to conceive of myself as beautiful (or not) in relation to others, and how or when such admiration (not love) entered my consciousness and became something I coveted. No spoilers, but there is a scene where the line “you’re very beautiful” is employed with devastating precision. Part of finding a sense of beauty from within means, I think, letting go of being admired as an object. It’s hard to do if you’ve been treated like a little doll for most of your life. Still, it’s great when someone calls you beautiful! Welcome to being a woman.
Baker’s Postscript
After several failures and experiments with other recipes, I’ve been on a groove baking these chocolate chip cookies from Smitten Kitchen. Though I can really taste the one tablespoon of vanilla extract a few days later and recommend using less. I asked my mom for silicone baking mats for the holidays and I’ve never looked back!