Let’s Start at the Very Beginning: Skin Cleansers II

Here it is: the post that’s been sitting around since I disappeared in January.

As if I didn’t already have enough to say on skin cleansers…

Korean skincare blogs have been talking about cleanser pH for years. As far as I can tell, this post by Kerry of Skin & Tonics and this post by Cat of Snow White and the Asian Pear seem to have kicked the conversation into high-gear in 2014. A year later, Cat (in the Hat) came back with this post on the science of cleanser pH, accompanied by chemists. The Asian Beauty subReddit has a public Google Doc for people to look up and record the pH of cleansers (with 487 entries as of 6/4/17). However, it’s only very recently that Western skincare blogs are also beginning to address pH; for example, both Caroline Hirons and Christopher “TophCam” Ponds didn’t begin testing for pH until 2017 (and both are sporadic about it, and neither have said much about the importance of pH in cleansers, etc).

Kerry’s post first planted the idea in my head that high pH cleansers were important, and by the time I found Cat’s blog, I was definitely ready to switch to low-pH cleansers. However, I’m interested in more than just Korean foaming cleansers; I want VARIETY in my low-pH cleansers. The acidity of skin is generally reported to be between 4.5 and 5.0; if I’m cutting out cleansers with a pH higher than 5, I want to have the widest possible pool to draw from.