Is cleansing with make-up wipes really causing your skin damage?

For a lot of us, face wipes are in the bathroom, they’re essential, they’re convenient, they’re cheap. They’re a quick means of removing the grime off our faces or our makeup.

The sales of face wipes have really escalated in the last few years, and our skin is not happy about it.

They are bad for the environment, and over 50% wash up on British beaches. Over 35 kilometers of wipes have washed up on English beaches, littering the coastline as people throw them down the toilet straight after they’re finished.

In this mixture we’ve got antibacterial wipes, self-tanning wipes, baby wipes and cleaning wipes, all of these are going down the toilet into our beaches.

So do we really want to be swimming with this in the summer? It’s a worsening serious ecological problem, but it’s also a problem for our skin.

The face wipes or baby wipes don’t disintegrate like toilet paper, as they’re partially plastic and the polyesters can take over 100 years to break down, this also presents a harmful factor for all of our wildlife.

Cleansing wipes contain drying alcohol, which rapidly ages your skin. Huge amounts of chemical components to keep them moist effective and preserved in their plastic containers. To dissolve lift and remove all the makeup off your skin and to remove the dead skin cells. Without rinsing these chemicals off, you are subjecting yourself to leaving grime and residue on your skin. This subjects your skin to an array of irritating chemicals that will sit on your skin and be absorbed into your bloodstream, as you sleep overnight.

When you use a face wipe, it’s easy to get into the habit of rubbing the eye area vigorously to remove stubborn eye makeup. The skin around the eye is extremely delicate and the rubbing motion alone will drag the skin and cause premature ageing, without even considering the potential ingredients. As well as irritation the high levels of alcohol and preservatives can cause extreme dryness, crepey skin, fine lines and really accelerate premature ageing.

Around your eyes, you need to be using products that are gentle, to stimulate circulation, to reduce fine lines, puffiness and dark circles. If you’re prone to spots and acne, you may feel you have excess oil production, and the face wipes are drying your spots out and this will improve your acne. However, it does exactly the opposite, drying out your skin won’t improve your acne, it will make it worse, as your skin will make more oil and the sebaceous oil glands will become over productive to compensate.

We need to be feeding our skin with friendly ingredients such as rosehip, black willow bark, or green tea. Makeup wipes just smear the makeup around our face with the bacteria from the dead skin cells causing irritation, due to the excessive preservatives, that prevent the microorganisms in the actual wipes from contaminating the other wipes.

Makeup wipes really encourage lazy cleansing. Most people think if they remove their makeup, they have cleansed their skin sufficiently, and then they proceed to the next steps of their skincare regime, made worse by this quick, easy, convenient waterless cleansing.

Smearing our makeup and all the bacteria, all over our face, and then applying our nightly serums and moisturisers, actually just infuses the bacteria into the deeper layers and the toxins are absorbed by our body into our bloodstream. As we sleep, the dirt its trapped in and clogs the pores, which are not able to close and harsh abrasive wipes, can cause over-exfoliation of our skin.
This all causes redness, irritation, sensitivity, flakiness, dull skin and breakups. We follow all this with an acid-based toner which irritates the skin, even further. Yet, I see this happening so often, because people don’t realise the stress that they are placing their skin under.

Life is already stressful. Let’s not stress out our skin any further.

If you have any questions about skincare or correct skin cleansing routines, then please give me a call or message me.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Amanda Azzopardi, an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Aesthetic Medicine Prescriber, specialises in ageing-related changes. With a Masters in Advanced Clinical Practice, she's trained at the renowned Harley Academy in London and the Level 7 accredited Derma Medical Academy. Boasting over 15 years of global experience in acute medical settings and extensive aesthetic insurance, Amanda combines care, skill, and professionalism to ensure your treatments are in trustworthy hands.