Evaluation of mild skin cleansers

Each person makes the decision of how best to care for his or her own skin. Among the prime concerns, especially for facial skin, is the type of dirt, debris, or make-up to be removed. In most cases, all products do an adequate job in the removal of dirt; if not, the washing techniques can be modified to accomplish the task at hand. What cannot be controlled are the adverse side effects inherent in the use of that product. These adverse properties include damages to the barrier function of the skin; increased susceptibility to environmental sources of irritation and sensitization; frank irritation responses, such as erythema and edema; and reduction of the cosmetic qualities of the skin, such as degree of moisture and smoothness. Part of the problem is that most of these changes are subtle, occurring slowly over time. Often, the association of these problems with the use of a particular facial cleansing regimen is overlooked. The typical woman uses as many as 10 to 15 facial cosmetic and cleansing products each day, making the identification of a problem even more difficult. It is important to identify the risks associated with individual products and with product categories in general. Although the identification of a safe group of products to use for facial cleansing is desirable, the results of this investigation indicate that there are no simple answers. It has been assumed that because moisturizing cream formulations are routinely safe and mild in general use, a cleansing product in the same general form would share these attributes. We can see from the results in Table 2 and Figures 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9 that cleansing creams are not uniformly superior to cleansing bars in the key attributes that are used to evaluate mildness. In each evaluation there were individual cleansing creams that demonstrated statistically weaker performance than did cleansing bars in general. As a group, cleansing creams did well in the cosmetic categories of dryness and texture but surprisingly poorly in such indicators of clinical safety as erythema and TEWL. Further evaluation of the components of the facial-washing regimens proposed by the manufacturers of many of the cleansing-cream products involved the direct comparison of a cleansing cream against that same product used with an alcohol-based toning product. In all cases, the addition of alcohol-based products to the cleaning protocol reduced the cosmetic and clinical safety of the regimen (see Table 2 and Figures 3, 5, 7, and 9).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)