5 Facts to Know Before You Choose a Facial Cleanser

[Intro] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Facially Conscious with myself, Trina Renea, esthetician, Dr. Vicki Rapaport, dermatologist, Rebecca Gadberry, the cosmetic ingredient guru, and our fabulous, overly-educated consumer, Julie Falls. We are gathered here together with you to talk about this crazy world of esthetics. It's confusing out there in this big wide world. 

That's why we are here to help explain it to you all, subject by subject. We will be your go-to girls, and from our perspective without giving medical advice, we will keep things facially conscious.

Let's get started. 

00:57 Trina Renea: Hello, hello, and welcome back to Facially Conscious. We are here today with Trina and Rebecca, and we are going to talk about five facts to know before you choose a facial cleanser. I know there's thousands and thousands of facial cleansers out there and it's very hard to decide which one to get, so we're going to give you some facts that it'll kind of guide you how to choose a facial cleanser.

Hello, Rebecca. How are you today?

01:32 Rebecca Gadberry: Hello, darling. I'm doing pretty good today. Just getting over COVID, but that's okay. I'm doing better. I had mild symptoms, but I was fully vaccinated. It's really weird. 

01:48 Trina Renea: Yeah, that’s weird.

01:49 Rebecca Gadberry: I mean, with all the boosters and everything.

01:51 Trina Renea: Yeah, why? Why is that happening?

01:55 Rebecca Gadberry: My son came down with it and I took care of him without knowing it was COVID.

02:00 Trina Renea: Oh, you thought it was just like a cold. How did you find out it was COVID? You just took a test?

02:04 Rebecca Gadberry: He took a test. He was positive. So I isolated for 10 days, and on the eighth day I was positive. “[singing] On the eighth day of COVID…”

02:15 Trina Renea: No way.

02:16 Rebecca Gadberry: I tested positive.

02:18 Trina Renea: You isolated for eight days before you got diagnosed?

02:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. Then I had to isolate for another 10 days.

02:24 Trina Renea: After three days, I would have been like, “Well, I guess it's not COVID,” and gone on with my…

02:30 Rebecca Gadberry: You can't do that. Well, this is not information about COVID. We tend to start with anything that comes to mind.

02:39 Trina Renea: That's okay.

02:40 Rebecca Gadberry: I hope everybody enjoys all the detritus that we toss into our episodes, but that leads us to facial cleansers. Detritus, the detritus on the skin. 

02:51 Trina Renea: I don't even know what that word means.

02:53 Rebecca Gadberry: It means waste material, stuff you don't want, extra stuff.

03:01 Trina Renea: Oh, and that leads to facial cleansers?

03:02 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, because you want to take the extra stuff, the stuff you don't want…

03:04 Trina Renea: Off your face.

03:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Off your skin, yeah. Yeah, it leads to facial cleansers. How did you like that little slippery segue?

03:12 Trina Renea: I liked it. All right. So, what are we going to talk about? What are these five facts that you've come up with for these…

03:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Before we selected— well, besides what you're going to add because, as one of the top estheticians in LA, I know you’ll talk about facial cleansers.

03:30 Trina Renea: I might argue with you a little but…

03:32 Rebecca Gadberry: I don't know if you will. You might be surprised. 

03:36 Trina Renea: Okay.

03:37 Rebecca Gadberry: So there's five things, as we talked about. You may need more than one cleanser. That's a fact to know.

03:46 Trina Renea: Okay. Well, I think that also depends. Okay. That's a really loaded fact.

03:53 Rebecca Gadberry: I know, that's why it's the first one. You want to know why you need more than one cleanser?

03:57 Trina Renea: You could tell me.

03:59 Rebecca Gadberry: You know that the PM one is obvious, right?

04:03 Trina Renea: We know, yes.

04:03 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay, so why is it obvious?

04:04 Trina Renea: Because during the day, you get a lot of environmental dust and grime on your face. Also, if you're female, you wear makeup and you sweat. The day needs to be washed off your face, so you should always cleanse your face at night. That's a for sure.

04:26 Rebecca Gadberry: And the sweat and all of that cigarette smoke. It's estimated that over 90% of the American population and almost 98% of global population lives in urban cities that the World Health Organization states are polluted.

04:48 Trina Renea: Right. So there's a lot of pollution on your face.

04:50 Rebecca Gadberry: There's a lot of pollution and the majority of that pollution is a particle called a PM, particle matter 2.5, which means that it is really, really tiny. It lands on your skin, it carries all sorts of other things on it, including bacteria, molds, yeast, fungus.

05:12 Trina Renea: Don't freak out everybody. It's just something that happens.

05:14 Rebecca Gadberry: It gets grosser from here.

05:16 Trina Renea: No, no, don’t scare people.

05:18 Rebecca Gadberry: When we talk about morning cleansers, oh, my goodness. Wait a second.

05:25 Trina Renea: If you think about, like, let's say you swept your balcony or your patio every day. You swept it in the morning, you would see a lot of dust coming off of your patio. Well, that dust is also sticking onto your face.

05:41 Rebecca Gadberry: Exactly. Good way to put it. And if you walk into a room where smoking has been going on for years and you take a picture of the wall, you can see all the smoke detritus on the wall that's left over that you don't want. Well, that is landing on your skin every day, not to mention what it's doing to your lungs.

05:59 Trina Renea: And other people's dead skin cells that flake off of their skin.

06:02 Rebecca Gadberry: And your own dead skin cells. So I think we have enough to gross people out. Now, if you haven't gone to another podcast by now, cleanse your face at night. This cleanser should be stronger, because it's got more to take off. 

You can even do a double cleansing, like some people like an oil cleanser first to dissolve all the oily material. Then they come after with a gentle water soluble or water rinseable cleanser. It's got a little foaming action. You should not be using hot water because the hot water can actually push or make the skin more absorbent to these PM 2.5s and other detritus on your skin. It can also aggravate the irritancy of certain foaming cleansers, like sulfate. Lukewarm is good.

I will follow with a splash of cold water not to tighten my pores, because you can't do that, but because splashes of cold water, like two or three splashes of really cold water sets off some of your hormones that are feel-good hormones. They're also anti-stressors. So you can get an emotional balance from washing your face as well.

07:15 Trina Renea: Wow, I've never heard that before.

07:17 Rebecca Gadberry: Kind of neat, huh. 

07:19 Trina Renea: Yeah. Does it put you in a good mood?

07:19 Rebecca Gadberry: Stick with me, baby. It puts you in a good mood, and if you're doing it right before bedtime…

07:23 Trina Renea: Because it makes me really cold.

07:26 Rebecca Gadberry: I take cold showers sometimes just to get de-stressed. Yeah, it really works. Not for longer than about a minute.

07:33 Trina Renea: Not freezing cold.

07:34 Rebecca Gadberry: No. Freezing cold. That's the idea behind cryotherapy, which I'd love to have a cryotherapy specialist on.

07:41 Trina Renea: We could do that.

07:44 Rebecca Gadberry: So, why do you wash in the morning?

07:44 Trina Renea: It's like Korean spas.

07:46 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, absolutely.

07:49 Trina Renea: I'm going to totally— you're going to freak out when I say this, because…

07:52 Rebecca Gadberry: You're not different.

07:55 Trina Renea: I tell people that you don't have to cleanse in the morning. You could splash your face with water. Unless you have oily skin or you sweat in the night or you have acne, then you should cleanse. But I tell people with dry skin or with mostly dry to normal skin that you don't have to cleanse in the morning. 

And I do find that it changes everyone who I said that one little step alone. When somebody comes to me and their skin is really dry, I'll say, “Are you cleansing morning and night?” And they say yes. I'm like, “Take out the morning cleanse, rinse your face with water and then put on all your serums.” That step alone balances their pH.

Because I think the industry has created— and I did learn this in your class at UCLA, has created all this double cleansing and stuff like that to, I mean cleansing morning and night and using all these different cleansers as a marketing technique to sell cleansers.

09:05 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. So since I taught you that, I have learned some new things, which I'm going to share with you.

You ever drool at night?

09:14 Trina Renea: I don't know. I'm sleeping.

09:15 Rebecca Gadberry: I do, and most people do.

09:17 Trina Renea: Oh, no, I definitely don't and I'll tell you why. I sleep on your back.

09:20 Rebecca Gadberry: I know, because you sleep on your back. How many people actually? I tried sleeping on my back, and because of my weight, and I obviously lost 50 lbs. since we've been doing this podcast, but since when I was larger, if I slept on my back, I had sleep apnea. 

09:40 Trina Renea: I think I have that too, but it's okay. I sleep on, like, five pillows, so it's almost like I'm sleeping in a lounge chair.

09:46 Rebecca Gadberry: The Princess and Pea, are we?

09:49 Trina Renea: As long as I sleep at a high angle, I don't snore as much. But I think I do have a bit of sleep apnea, because I definitely snore. That's what happens when you sleep on your back.

09:59 Rebecca Gadberry: That's right, and you usually drool when you snore. Well, if you're drooling, and most people, men and women over the age of 50 drool at a certain point, plus if your skin is starting to get lax around your mouth and you're getting that jelly, you drool into the folds of the skin.

Now, you also lose skin cells at night. What's attached to the skin cells? Demodex mites. What's also…

10:27 Trina Renea: We're going to talk about Demodex mites.

10:30 Rebecca Gadberry: And these are the little mites that are in your pores. They're associated with rosacea, but only when there's also staphylococcus bacteria on the Demodex. 

10:41 Trina Renea: Yes, people, we have bugs all over our face. 

10:43 Rebecca Gadberry: We have bugs, and we have bugs that are living in our pillows. Unless you're changing your pillowcase every night, how many people do that? How many people? I read…

10:51 Trina Renea: Oh, my God, we're going to freak everyone out.

10:54 Rebecca Gadberry: This is why I said it gets grosser. I read that the average person changes their sheets six times a year. 

11:02 Trina Renea: What?

11:03 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. That really grossed me out. But there are people listening to this podcast…

11:07 Trina Renea: Six times a year, that's once every two months?

11:09 Rebecca Gadberry: That’s right. There are people listening to this podcast who have not changed their pillowcase in a while. So you could change it every night, but you're still going to have mites and bacteria in the morning.

11:21 Trina Renea: I tell acne people to change their pillowcases every night, people with skin issues.

11:27 Rebecca Gadberry: Absolutely. And there are pillow cases made for them, by the way.

11:30 Trina Renea: Yeah, that are hypoallergenic and don't hold mites. There's also your sheets.

11:37 Rebecca Gadberry: They hold mites. And your blankets. And if you pull your blankets up around your face or your sheets up around your face, then you have the person you're sleeping with and what are they doing to their face, and how much face activity contact did we have the night before? 

11:47 Trina Renea: I'm stressed out right now.

11:51 Rebecca Gadberry: And then not to mention all the products you put on before you go to bed. There's still the residue left over in the morning. So you have all this detritus in the morning that's very different than what you live with.

12:04 Trina Renea: You know what? I like to feed my bugs in the morning.

12:06 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. I do too. They're my community. I love my community. I have more microbes, as you do, than you have human cells. They outnumber human cells three to 10 times.

12:20 Trina Renea: We have bugs living inside of us too, lots of them.

12:22 Rebecca Gadberry: We do, and we couldn't live without them. They make Vitamin K for us. They do all sorts— we'll do a thing on the microbes, on microbiome.

12:32 Trina Renea: We can put all the pictures on our website of all the bugs that live on our face.

12:36 Rebecca Gadberry: You know, I was the first one in the industry to talk about the microbiome back in the late odds. 

12:41 Trina Renea: I know. You were big on the microbiome. You still are.

12:46 Rebecca Gadberry: I still am, but there's a lot…

12:48 Trina Renea: I have an itch under my headphone.

12:48 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. I get that too. Go ahead and scratch it. It's probably a microbe or two running around and they're going, “Oh, yes, yes, they're talking about us.”

12:56 Trina Renea: Creepy-crawling.

12:57 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. I once said the thing about morning cleansing to about 2,000 people in an audience. You should have heard, when I got to drooling, the collective groan of 2,000 people. Talk about feeling a sense of power.

13:11 Trina Renea: All right. So if you want, cleanse your face in the morning.

13:13 Rebecca Gadberry: So what do you do? You don't use the one you use at night.

13:16 Trina Renea: No, you use a very gentle cleanser that doesn't strip off anything off your skin except it just cleanses. A gentle, gentle cleanser. 

13:24 Rebecca Gadberry: Gentle cleansing so it doesn't even disturb your microbiome that's natural to your skin. So how do you know that? Well, you look for sulfate-free cleansers. There's also cleansers now being sold to be gentle on the microbiome. I might be able to…

13:41 Trina Renea: It says that on the bottle?

13:42 Rebecca Gadberry: It actually says that in the advertising, yeah.

13:45 Trina Renea: Gentle on your microbiome.

13:47 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes.

13:48 Trina Renea: Wow, that's some scientific stuff right there.

13:52 Rebecca Gadberry: I will look at doing some Instagram posts on that when we drop this episode.

13:55 Trina Renea: Okay. And then what’s our second fact here? Cleaning ingredients are…

14:01 Rebecca Gadberry: You want to move on, huh?

14:05 Trina Renea: Yeah. We have five facts to get through in 15 minutes.

14:09 Rebecca Gadberry: We could do it.

14:10 Trina Renea: Well, four more facts, because one…

14:12 Rebecca Gadberry: It goes quickly after this, but I had to drive the case home about AM cleansing. Did I change your mind?

14:18 Trina Renea: I don't know. I like not cleansing. I remember when I was driving somewhere and I had just become an esthetician. This was like 18 years ago. And I was thinking about why men don't age as drastically as women. And women get so much more dry and wrinkly and men’s skin stays in pretty good shape.

I was like, “You know what? I bet men never wash their face.” We wash our face twice a day. We're stripping off those natural oils that we…

14:59 Rebecca Gadberry: And the microbiome.

15:00 Trina Renea: And the microbiome. We're constantly stripping things off and putting stuff on and they just leave their skin be and their skin is better. So I'm like, I'm going to try not doing so much and see how that goes. And look at my skin. Isn't it beautiful?

15:19 Rebecca Gadberry: It's gorgeous, but also you do many other things. Men have testosterone, which is a skin protector.

15:27 Trina Renea: I'll just take testosterone then.

15:28 Rebecca Gadberry: You actually have it in your body but the estrogen counteracts the effects of the testosterone until we get to menopause. 

15:37 Trina Renea: And then we grow hair on our face.

15:39 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, then we grow hair on our face but our skin, you know. 

15:43 Trina Renea: We get a square jaw, grow hair and become a man.

15:46 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. I've been shaving for 12 years now. I'm teasing. I'm teasing, everybody. But I do have that facial hair.

15:55 Trina Renea: It's okay for women to shave. I tell them all the time. If they get bumps from waxing and they have a problem with threading, and they want to go microblading, I'm like, “Just take a razor to your face and shave that off. Nobody's going to know. Who cares? Just do it.”

16:17 Rebecca Gadberry: Or if you have light hair, like I do, I just pull them out with a tweezer when they pop up. I say, “No, you're not going to live here.”

16:25 Trina Renea: But some people have a lot more hair than a tweezer.

16:27 Rebecca Gadberry: Like I said, if you're like me and it's light. But, anyway, that's your genetics right there. So what's the next question?

16:34 Trina Renea: The next question is cleansing…

16:34 Rebecca Gadberry: It's not a question. It's a fact.

16:39 Trina Renea: It's a fact. Cleansing ingredients are called surfactants. They're different than what you use to wash your dishes. Surfactants is what makes a cleanser a cleanser, but there's different types of surfactants used for skin and then also for dishes and for cars and different materials.

17:02 Rebecca Gadberry: Floors, garage floors.

17:04 Trina Renea: Right. You wouldn't clean your face with 409.

17:07 Rebecca Gadberry: No, you wouldn't, but it might have the same ingredients, at least according to the ingredient list.

17:13 Trina Renea: Could you wash your face with Comet?

17:15 Rebecca Gadberry: Actually, back in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, people used to do that as a powder. They'd wet it like a mask and then they’d put it on.

17:23 Trina Renea: Comet?

17:23 Rebecca Gadberry: Comet.

17:24 Trina Renea: On their face?

17:24 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, as a scrub, as a natural exfoliant.

17:28 Trina Renea: Oh, my God, that would make them so dry.

17:28 Rebecca Gadberry: I'm not advocating it. And then they'd follow with Crisco.

17:32 Trina Renea: What? Oh, my God. Ketchup and Velveeta, lasagna.

17:39 Rebecca Gadberry: And people say, well, we just did that on another podcast, but people say that the cosmetic industry is frivolous. It prevents you from using Comet on your skin.

17:49 Trina Renea: Oh, my God. I remember doing a test with a pH pen. We would test— was that with you that I did that?

18:03 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, and Dermalogica used to teach that and several other companies.

18:05 Trina Renea: Dermalogica, maybe. Yeah, where you take Comet and you take some cleansers and you take different kinds of cleansers and you put them on a surface. You run that pH pen through them and see which ones are as bad as a Comet. They turn black. It was amazing to see the differences in…

18:27 Rebecca Gadberry: Really interesting marketing thing, because pH balance, which you've mentioned a couple of times, was introduced by Jheri Redding who founded Redken along with Paula Kent Meehan who was the— this is a little bit of industry trivia. Paula Kent Meehan earned the money to fund her hairdresser Jheri Redding in a company that was eventually called Redken - Paula Kent and Jheri Redding, Red-Ken - with her residual checks from 77 Sunset Strip where she played the hat check girl.

19:09 Trina Renea: What? That's so cool.

19:11 Rebecca Gadberry: Isn't that cool? That's how one of the giants of the professional industry was started. Well, Jheri realized that if you had a cleanser of 5.5 pH, the cleanser would thicken and it would feel more luxurious than a cleanser that was a higher pH, which a lot of the— I'm sorry, shampoos. A lot of shampoos at that time were very thin. They had a higher pH. So he put salt in the sodium lauryl sulfate. Was it a higher pH or a lower pH? 

Anyway, he thickened it by changing the pH to 5.5, which he said was ideal for hair. It was ideal for the shampoo thickness or viscosity. He later went in and studied the effects on hair and Redken was based on selling pH balance, their amino bar. Their aminoplex bar was the first one on the market back in the early ‘60s, I think it was, for pH balance. You could wash your body with it, your face with it and your hair with it. That's how that company was built.

Well, they got so much press on this concept as being unique, that's how we came to believe that the perfect cleanser was 5.5. It isn't. The perfect cleanser for the viscosity or thickness of the cleanser is 5.5, but when you add alpha-hydroxy acids, you might drop it down to 4.5 to maintain the acid level a little bit better. You could also thin it out a little bit and make it 8.0 or a little higher, which is actually a little better for oily skin, in some cases.

So it depends upon what the skin type is as to what the pH should be. And Jheri is the one who came up with the pen, by the way, that you were just talking about, the pencil. 

21:10 Trina Renea: Oh, really? 

21:11 Rebecca Gadberry: While that was a great marketing gimmick, it wasn't necessarily true overall for the skin, which we didn't know back then. So this is different.

Also, when you wash your skin with a cleanser, even if it's pH 5.5 it only changes the surface pH of your skin very temporarily for maybe 30, 40 minutes. Then your skin surface…

21:37 Trina Renea: Fixes it.

21:39 Rebecca Gadberry: It goes back to whatever it was. And this is as unique as your fingerprint is. It depends upon what food you've eaten, how much stress you're under, what drugs you’ve taken.

21:47 Trina Renea: I also think once you cleanse your face with a cleanser, if you feel that really tight feeling, it was probably a lower pH.

21:55 Rebecca Gadberry: No, it had stronger surfactants in it. That's what the problem is, is that the more surfactant does its job, and the job of a surfactant is to degrease the skin. Some of our more popular surfactants, like sodium lauryl sulfate…

22:13 Trina Renea: Which is a bad one.

22:15 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, it's not bad if you have really bad oily skin. Then it cuts through the oil and it leaves your skin feeling normal. But because it's so efficient at what it does, if there's no oil on the skin or there's no residue to remove, then it goes down into the barrier that we've talked about in past episodes, and it dissolves some of the lipids or the fats that are in the barrier. 

22:40 Trina Renea: And then you get dry.

22:40 Rebecca Gadberry: Then you get that tight feeling followed by skin cells that dry out that want to peel off like peeled shingles on a dry roof. And then you get ashiness if you've got any melanin in your skin. You also get that tightness, because the lipids have been removed.

23:01 Trina Renea: Dull-looking skin too.

23:02 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, dull-looking skin, devitalized skin, and you get a skin that feels tight because the lipids have been removed. So the skin is drawing together because some of it has been removed, so it feels tight.

Some people say, “Oh, that's that dry, squeaky feeling, or that clean squeaky feeling.” No, that's that dry leads to irritation and ashiness feeling.

23:25 Trina Renea: Maybe change your cleanser.

23:27 Rebecca Gadberry: Exactly. So you want to look at cleansers that they should always wash off, even if you're using one of the wipes. And you can use a wipe in the morning, by the way, as an AM cleanser. I forgot to add that. But even if you're using a wipe, you should do a rinse or two on your skin.

23:47 Trina Renea: After the wipe, yeah.

23:49 Rebecca Gadberry: After the wipe, but…

23:49 Trina Renea: Because you're leaving that kind of chemical, whatever it's made of on your skin.

23:54 Rebecca Gadberry: The surfactant. And what surfactants do is they make surfaces more acceptable to one another. So when you use a surfactant, it's called a surface active agent surfactant. The very first surfactants on the market were used in detergents. They were developed by the chemists at Proctor & Gamble, P&G. 

Then we started to find out that the detergents that we were using to clean our clothes, that one of the main problems with cleansers back then, or washing soaps as they were frequently called or washing powders, was that they leave a residue in the clothes. So you can only wash your clothes maybe five or six times before they started to deteriorate. A year before they started to deteriorate. 

So, the chemists at P&G said, “Okay, well, let's see if we can rinse completely.” That's how they came up with the first surfactant, which was sodium lauryl sulfate, and it rinsed completely. 

Then there was a product called Dreft. It was pink. I remember using it as a bubble bath.

25:15 Trina Renea: That’s for the kids.

25:15 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, but it came out as a washing powder first. You used it as a bubble bath. You used it to wash your dishes. You used it to wash your hair and your body. Then we found out that it was a little bit drying, a lot drying. It also gave children, girl children vaginal…

25:35 Trina Renea: From washing the clothes in Dreft, because I used that.

25:38 Rebecca Gadberry: No, while putting it in the bath water, which is why we have now, today, we have the warnings on bubble bath.

25:46 Trina Renea: I don't do any bubble bath.

25:48 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, you can do bubble bath, just make sure it's got the warning on it or it doesn't contain certain sulfates ingredients.

25:53 Trina Renea: I would just use a really gentle cleanser.

25:56 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. Okay, so wait second. Let's go back to sulfates. The first sulfate product that we used on our face was called Zest, and it's still on the market today.

26:08 Trina Renea: I've heard of Zest.

26:10 Rebecca Gadberry: It was marketed as a soap substitute bar. When they put it in water, you know, do you remember the commercial? It was back in the ‘60s so not everybody does, but you can look up the first Zest commercial I think on YouTube. It's really fun because the lady of the house had a dish that she would put in regular dishwater. She would pick up the dish, hold it up to the camera and it left a scum so thick you could write your name in it, which she did.

26:40 Trina Renea: I remember some commercials like that.

26:43 Rebecca Gadberry: Then you put the Zest in water and you put your dishes in the Zest and it came out…

26:49 Trina Renea: Sparkly clean.

26:50 Rebecca Gadberry: Rinseably clean. You couldn't write your name in it. It was sparkling. It was sparkly clean, and that's because it had the sodium lauryl sulfate in it.

26:59 Trina Renea: But wasn't Zest for the face?

27:01 Rebecca Gadberry: It was for the face. It was a soap bar or it was a soap substitute bar, which is also called a synthetic detergent bar, or in the industry we call them syndets. Now, syndets, you can tell a syndet because it doesn't have ingredients on the soap bar, because soaps are not sold, as far as the FDA is concerned, just for the skin. It can also be used in anything else. 

Only cosmetics have to have the ingredient list on them. So if the bar has an ingredient list on it, you're looking at a syndet or a soap substitute.

27:37 Trina Renea: Interesting.

27:39 Rebecca Gadberry: So it won't leave a residue on your skin.

27:41 Trina Renea: Do you know that I used Ivory soap, the bar, to wash my face until I was 34?

27:50 Rebecca Gadberry: So what is that? 98.5% or 99.5% pure soap?

27:57 Trina Renea: I know. 

27:58 Rebecca Gadberry: Pure, write your name in it.

28:00 Trina Renea: I didn't stop using it until I became an esthetician and did the pH test on it and realized it was as bad as using Comet on my face.

28:07 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, that was like 13 or something. Yeah, absolutely.

28:12 Trina Renea: That's crazy.

28:14 Rebecca Gadberry: And what Consumer Reports used to do is, every year, they would run an article about how bad surfactants were for your skin and your hair. They would wash hair with dishwashing soap and it would dry your hair out. Well, it has the same ingredients as your shampoo, so you might as well use dishwashing soap. 

And I once wrote a letter to the editor who said that. It was never printed. It was never acknowledged by Consumer Reports, saying, “If you think that, I hope you wash your hair in dishwasher soap for the rest of your life.” Because, while the ingredient list may be the same words or the same names, there are differences in that ingredient, and that leads to our next fact.

29:01 Trina Renea: Our next fact, the grade of surfactants.

29:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, they're graded, but not like we are in school. It's not like an A, B, C, D, F. They're graded according to the amount of contaminants that are left after processing the ingredient. 

We were just talking about, probably still to this day, one of the most common surfactants and the surfactant that all other surfactants are judged by because it's one of the best sudsing surfactants that we have, sodium lauryl sulfate. 

Sodium lauryl sulfate, there are several hundred different grades of the ingredient that would go on your ingredient list as sodium lauryl sulfate. These grades are technical grade, which can be used to wash garage floors or used to clean your windows.

29:55 Trina Renea: I have a little fun fact. When I was a teenager, I had a box of bubble bath. They came in a box of powder. I can't remember what it's called. I wanted to make the jacuzzi a bubble bath and so I poured the whole box into the jacuzzi.

30:13 Rebecca Gadberry: Oh, my goodness. How much money was that to fix?

30:16 Trina Renea: No, it broke it permanently. I ruined it. But it bubbled up so high and then it just bubbled down onto the ground and all over the floor and I thought was amazing and so cool, and we were like splashing around in the bubbles. 

30:30 Rebecca Gadberry: And you didn't even have TikTok to take advantage of it.

30:33 Trina Renea: I know, but it's a memory locked into my brain forever. Me and my brother got in big trouble and then we never had a jacuzzi again, because we broke it. My dad's like, “Well, too bad for you.”

30:43 Rebecca Gadberry: There you go. Well, let that be a lesson to you. I think it was.

30:48 Trina Renea: But it was sodium lauryl sulfate.

30:50 Rebecca Gadberry: Sodium lauryl sulfate, yeah, because I'm sure it was in there.

30:53 Trina Renea: Super suds.

30:55 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, that was. And it was a powdered form. It comes in powder and liquid. And because of the grades, the technical grade should never be used in cosmetics. It can contain, just like mineral oil which we talked about in one of the first episodes this season, it comes in different grades. There's technical grade, which can contain contaminants that can be carcinogenic or mild or irritating, even majorly irritating. And a lot of the original studies done on sodium lauryl sulfate were done on the technical grade.

Then there's the cosmetic grade, which has the irritants removed and the carcinogens removed, but may still be very strong. 

And then there's what's called the USP grade, the United States Pharmacopeia. This is the grade that is defined by the FDA or the USDA under their Drug and Cosmetics Act as being able to be used in drugs because it's so highly purified. While you can't tell if cosmetic or technical grade is being used in your products, you can list if it's a drug, sodium lauryl sulfate USP, for instance. But if it's a cosmetic, you can't list the USP grade. You either have to ask what the grade is, if you're concerned for a facial cleanser, or just avoid it all together.

The different grades…

32:23 Trina Renea: Avoid what? 

32:25 Rebecca Gadberry: The surfactant, like sodium lauryl sulfate. But any cleansing agent…

32:29 Trina Renea: So there's cleansers that have no surfactants in them.

32:33 Rebecca Gadberry: That's right.

32:35 Trina Renea: So what do they use in their cleanse?

32:35 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, they have surfactants, but they don't have the foaming kind of surfactants. 

So there's different types of surfactants. There's the foaming kind, which not only foam up and degrease, they cut oil, but they also surround the particles that are on your skin, like those PM 2.5s. And they suspend it so that when the water comes along, it just sweeps it away.

You can also have emulsifiers. What emulsifiers do in the form of certain types of emulsifying ingredients like, stearic acid or some of your natural oils, which are used in these oil cleansers. They actually help to dissolve the oiliness making it more soluble. Then you wipe it off and then you rinse it off, and you might follow by a toner.

33:34 Trina Renea: I particularly am fond of foaming cleansers, that it comes out of the bottle foamed.

33:44 Rebecca Gadberry: It has a foamer built into the foam.

33:47 Trina Renea: It has a foamer.

33:49 Rebecca Gadberry: Built into the container.

33:50 Trina Renea: So in the container is liquid, but when you push the pump, foam comes out. I like the feeling of that on my skin. Is that surfactant?

33:59 Rebecca Gadberry: Of course, yeah. 

34:02 Trina Renea: It just makes it foam when it comes out, but it doesn't mean that it's a stronger…

34:08 Rebecca Gadberry: No. As a matter of fact, it could be weaker, although I've done formulas for acne that are very strong. They're using particular types of surfactants that make the dirt and the oil more water available so that when you rinse the skin, it rinses completely away, but it doesn't dry the skin out. That's some of the things that you need to be careful of.

34:33 Trina Renea: I made a baby…

34:36 Rebecca Gadberry: You made a baby, I know. She's so adorable, but she's older now. She's not a baby anymore.

34:40 Trina Renea: Yeah, no. But I made a baby cleanser, a cleanser for the babies.

34:44 Rebecca Gadberry: I remember.

34:46 Trina Renea: And I had it a foaming cleanser because it would sit on their head or like sit in place and not run down and get in their eyes and stuff like that. I thought it was a good thing for the babies. And it was super non-strip, it did not strip the skin.

35:04 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, and that's because it's using non-sulfates, but it's also using that at very low percentages. So when you have a foaming cleanser, you're getting mostly air into the cleanser, which automatically drops the ratio or the amount of surfactants that is in the product. 

Then instead of sulfates, you want to look on your label for things like betaine, sultaine. I'm going to put that in a podcast or, I'm sorry…

35:31 Trina Renea: A blog.

35:32 Rebecca Gadberry: Not in a blog. Well, maybe in a blog, but I am definitely going to put this on the week that this runs. I'll be doing Instagram posts on it, so stay tuned. Because this is how we're keeping in touch with the audience now.

35:45 Trina Renea: Yeah. We have to finish up here pretty quick, because we have a guest coming.

35:51 Rebecca Gadberry: We do.

35:52 Trina Renea: So, let's go over the last two you and we'll get back to sulfates. We're going to have an episode on sulfates specific, right?

35:58 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, next year.

35:59 Trina Renea: Okay. So you want to choose a cleanser for your skin not just on what you like and dislike, and definitely not because you like the smell.

36:09 Rebecca Gadberry: How many people pick a cleanser because they like the smell?

36:13 Trina Renea: I mean, how many people pick products in general because they like the smell? It's the smell.

36:18 Rebecca Gadberry: And yet people say, “I don't want any fragrance in my product,” but the first thing you do, like we talked about during the fragrance episode, is we smell it. And it's a protective device for humans or all animals. We don't put anything on our bodies or eat if it doesn't smell right.

So you want to pay attention to the ingredients. And, again, we're going to follow up on that on Instagram, so stay tuned for that. 

And then the last one is, how do you select the right cleanser? I'm going to go to you as the big-name esthetician in Los Angeles.

36:52 Trina Renea: So, the way that I select cleansers for clients, I have a few different ones because there's different types of skin. 

37:03 Rebecca Gadberry: There is. 

37:06 Trina Renea: Acne clients, it's the easiest one because you want to find something that's a little stronger that's going to really take off that oil and clean that acne.

37:17 Rebecca Gadberry: And you may want a sulfate in there at that point.

37:19 Trina Renea: Right. I either do like a benzoyl peroxide cleanser, depending if they have active acne, or I may choose something with glycolic and salicylic acids in it. Salicylic acid is a standard ingredient they put in for acne clients.

37:37 Rebecca Gadberry: Or glycolic.

37:38 Trina Renea: And glycolic. I have a blended one that I have in mine, and I put a little jojoba beads in there to help. Once the glycolic and salicylic start working, the jojoba beads help to kind of wash it off.

37:52 Rebecca Gadberry: But it's not a strong bead.

37:53 Trina Renea: Not strong.

37:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, because you don't want to open up any blemishes.

37:55 Trina Renea: No, it feels like rubber and it's really gentle.

37:58 Rebecca Gadberry: So it kind of conforms a little bit to the skin.

38:00 Trina Renea: Yeah, yeah. Then for mostly everybody else, I have them, some of the clients that are either aging or normal to dry skin, I have them use gentle cleansers. I have two different gentle cleansers. One's that's a hydrating cleanser with a lot of panthenol in it.

38:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Panthenol is really good, because it stays behind and continues to hydrate the skin after the cleanser has been washed away. So that’s a nice one.

38:30 Trina Renea: Right. And it pulls that water into the skin. It's great. And then I have a really, for sensitive skin, a very, very gentle cleanser that's like for people who get red easily, who get irritated easily, people who are using stronger products. If they're using glycolics and retinols and older, or if they're acneic and they're using strong medicines from their doctor, I'll have them use a super, super gentle, sensitive skin cleanser in the morning and then I'll have them use their stronger cleanser at night. That's when I'll have people doing the double cleansing. 

39:06 Rebecca Gadberry: We're already rethinking this, I see.

39:11 Trina Renea: So, I'd say most people, I would say choose a cleanser that's not going to strip your skin, unless of course you're acneic.

39:20 Rebecca Gadberry: How do you know if it strips the skin?

39:22 Trina Renea: You’ll feel really super tight afterwards. Like, you'll wash your face and then you'll feel like that squeaky clean, tight-tight feeling. That's too drying, I think.

39:32 Rebecca Gadberry: So when we say strip the skin, it's not necessarily stripping the skin of oils. It's stripping the skin of the lipids between your cells and your barrier.

39:41 Trina Renea: Exactly.

39:41 Rebecca Gadberry: That makes it not only ashier but more sensitive and easily irritated.

39:45 Trina Renea: Yes, and then you're having to put more serums on and creams to counteract that stripping of your skin.

39:48 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. It's a vicious cycle. Yes, it's a vicious cycle.

39:54 Trina Renea: Yeah, so that's how I select the right cleansers. Just try to make sure you're putting a cleanser on your skin that feels like it's cleaning but it doesn't feel like it's tight. You want to make sure that you feel clean afterwards, like the cleanser is all coming off. You don't want that feel of like it feels slimy.

40:17 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. I don't want that either. And some companies will say, “Oh, it cleans and it moisturizes.” Well, when you leave a residue on the skin, it's not moisturizing. It's continuing to irritate the skin. You want to get everything off and then do moisturizing as a separate step.

40:37 Trina Renea: Yes. Okay. Well, I think that's good for today.

40:41 Rebecca Gadberry: Do we know enough about cleansers now? 

40:44 Trina Renea: I think we know a lot.

40:45 Rebecca Gadberry: If we don't know enough, stay tuned for the Instagram and look at the blog this week.

40:49 Trina Renea: And look at all the bugs on your face that we're going to post.

40:52 Rebecca Gadberry: With a microscope. Oh, my goodness. We're going to have fun this week.

40:57 Trina Renea: Oh, yes. All right, y'all. Thank you for— I said all right, y'all, like I'm from the Midwest.

41:04 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, that's because we're thinking about some of our compatriots that are down south right now. Nashville, I was going to say clean, in good faith, or good face.

41:18 Trina Renea: Good face. All right. Have a wonderful day, everybody, and we'll see you next time. Bye.

41:25 Rebecca Gadberry: Bye. We'll hear you next time.

41:28 Trina Renea: We'll hear you. 

41:29 Rebecca Gadberry: We won't hear them. They'll hear us.

41:30 Trina Renea: We don't see them, ever.

41:32 Rebecca Gadberry: No.

41:33 Trina Renea: But we can talk to them.

41:34 Rebecca Gadberry: We can.

41:35 Trina Renea: If you want to talk to us, you can always text us. Oh, no, you can't text us, but you can write us on Instagram. Where else can they get in touch with us? Faciallyconscious.com.

41:44 Rebecca Gadberry: On our Facebook…

41:47 Trina Renea: Facebook.

41:48 Rebecca Gadberry: And also dot-com. 

41:50 Trina Renea: And Faciallyconscious.com. All right, y'all.

41:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Again.

41:57 Trina Renea: Okay, bye for real.

41:58 Rebecca Gadberry: Goodbye. 

[Outro] This podcast is so needed in the world right now. There's so much information out there that it's hard to know who to believe and if it's right for you. We are very excited to be your guides and bring you Facially Conscious. You can find info we talked about today in our show notes and on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. 

Please subscribe, like and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps others find us. And if you have any questions or ideas, please send us an email at info@faciallyconscious.com.