FARMACY GREEN CLEAN MAKEUP MELTAWAY CLEANSING BALM

This is a fantastic balm cleanser.  A proper, hefty, 90ml pot to dig your fingers into (no useless spatula for me, thanks all the same), it has a fresh, citrus-mixed-with-sugar scent that I have really come to look forward to experiencing.

It is a balm with a thinner consistency, meaning you need very little and it turns easily to a very slippy oil, annihilating makeup and encouraging self-massage. (Am I the only one that thinks self-massage sounds very ‘70s, all porn moustaches and floral robes? I know, I know, mind out of the gutter. I shall try to keep it clean… we are in the land of cleansers, after all.) 

It’s easy to remove with a warm washcloth and leaves my skin feeling smooth and comfortable – neither tight nor with some irritating gunky film. Also, it never stings my fairly sensitive eyes, which I think is an essential element of a balm cleanser. Really, who can be bothered to use a separate eye makeup remover when just about the whole point of cleansing with oil is getting that entire face of slap off in one go?

There has been a lot of talk, presumably exacerbated by the fairly smug product name, about Green Clean (cue eyeroll) containing plastic. The specific ingredient of concern is polyethylene, and it’s the fifth ingredient down the list, so it’s there in a significant amount. Wiki tells us it’s the most common plastic in the world, and INCIDecoder says that, in its wax form (as is presumably used here), it is often included in beauty products to provide “body, hardness and slip”. It sounds like its usage is common enough that it need not be a safety concern, and for what it’s worth it’s never flared up my acne, so it doesn’t seem to be comedogenic, either (however it might sound, to be putting plastic-as-wax on your face!). I did some more digging and found that the venerable Paula Begoun’s fairly pedantic Beautypedia makes no mention of it in their review, either positively or negatively. However, they – smartly, rightly – are not remotely on the ‘clean’ bandwagon, so if polyethylene is no cause for concern to your skin in their eyes, it’s not in mine.

Is there an eco issue with it, though? After all, polyethylene is what infamous microbeads are made from, those tiny little exfoliating nuggets, formerly ubiquitous in cosmetic products and now mostly banned due to their horrifying environmental impact. I, the non-scientist, can only presume it is considered more environmentally safe in this wax form, given that not only has this form of it not been banned, it is still used consistently in the industry. Even in a product claiming in its very name to be both ‘green’ and ‘clean’, no less! (I jest, I jest – I very much follow the school of thought that, in this industry, those two words, used alone, though particularly when used in conjunction, are utterly meaningless).

In the current bid to seemingly ban all plastic from our lives forever, I can only presume we will see less and less of this ingredient. In the meantime, I like this cleanser so much I would purchase again, but I certainly look forward to the industry discovering a useful, non-comedogenic alternative to microplastic.