Is Salt Good For Your Face?

November

Stephanie says: My friend raves about Estee Lauder Idealist Micro-D Thermal Face Polisher so I looked up the ingredients. The first one listed is calcium chloride, which, apparently, is corrosive and is used to make bleu cheese. How can this be safe to use on your skin? My friend also wants to know if adding an eye dropper-full to a jar of her regular scrub would yield the same exfoliating results?

The Right Brain’s cheesy reply:
We’re not sure what calcium chloride does for cheese, (our guess is that it’s a protein cross-linking agent) but in this formula it functions as a gritty abrasive. And yes it can be corrosive if left in contact with metal surfaces, but in the context of a rinse-off facial scrub you don’t need to worry about that.

Salty scrub

Can you add calcium chloride to your regular scrub and save a ton of money? No, and here’s why. This Idealist product is basically a type of salt scrub. As the name implies, salt scrubs use salt crystals as exfoliating agents (sugar scrubs do the same with sugar.) Since salt dissolves in water, these scrubs have to be made with oil or some other anhydrous base. (Anhydrous just means “without water.”) In the case of this Idealist product, the formula is based cyclomethicone, a type of silicone, instead of water. But if you added calcium chloride to a regular water-based scrub, like St. Ives Apricot scrub, it would just dissolve and would have no benefit.

The Beauty Brains bottom line

This may be a perfectly fine product, but it’s really just a glorified salt scrub. The most important question in our mind is, is Idealist Thermal Face Polisher worth it’s $63 price tag?

Does anyone use expensive department stores brands, like Estee Lauder, instead of drug store brands? Leave a comment and share your experiences with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.

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Filed under Exfoliation, Questions.

There has been 9 comments. Leave a comment

9 Responses to “Is Salt Good For Your Face?”

cristavalentine Says:

I mix seasalt st ivys apricot scrub and noxema, seems like I can feel the salt in it, am I just imagining it?
Lauren Ruettimann Says:

Calcium chloride makes a firmer setting curd, duh. Everyone knows that.
Right Brain Says:

Crista: Good point. I should clarify what I meant in this post. If you add salt to your scrub and use it right away (or reasonably soon) then the salt will work just fine. But if you add salt to a water based product and let it sit, eventually the salt will dissolve.

Lauren: Whey? No whey! Thanks Lil’ Ms Muffet.
Lucia Says:

I do use one Estee Lauder product, which I’ve been loyal to for a while, and It’s DayWear plus SPF15 moisturizer for oily skin, the ingredients (antioxidants, SPF) have been sort of proven to be beneficial, but the reason I buy it, is the texture and smell, it feels sooo good when you put it on, it gets absorbed in second, hydrates skin very well and it doesn’t make me break out at all
For me it’s worth the price tag, which is not as much, considering some olay moisturizers now go for almost 30 bucks!!
Ann Says:

A fabulous inexpensive way to polish your face is add a bit- maybe a quarter teaspoon- of baking soda to your favorite creamy cleanser. It is gently yet effective… you can easily regulate the amount and because it is your favorite cleanser, there are no surprises as far as irritating ingredients in some new product. Plus, it is super cheap.
Marie Says:

I have used a Buf-Puf on my face (and body) for 25 years and would be lost without it. Absolutely nothing makes my skin look and feel cleaner and fresher.
Amy Says:

I don’t think that sunscreens, skincreams etc. are any better from the department store lines but the lipsticks seem completely worth it. Whenever I tried a drugstore lipstick, I ended up not using it –and wasting my money. Chanel lipsticks are my favourite…
skindoc Says:

The expensive products DO work better. No matter what anyone says, they definitely do. That would be the reason why dermatologists prescribe expensive prescriptions for your skin. If you’d really like to know why your Chanel lipstick feels and works better than a Walgreens lipstick-check the ingredients. The proof’s all there.
thebeautybrains Says:

Being formulators of both expensive and less expensive products we can say that price has very little to do with how well a product works. The fact that dermatologists sell you something doesn’t make it better. It just means the dermatologist is making money off the sale.