When you are washing your face, you may be wondering, “can you just wash your face with water” and ignore soap completely. This may be because cleansers are expensive, you can’t seem to find one that works for your face type, or you are just busy.
No matter the reason, the answer is the same. Washing your face with just water has a lot of benefits, but it shouldn’t be all you do. Using soap occasionally helps break down grime and pollutants that water alone cannot remove.
Can You Just Wash Your Face With Water?
There is a lot of debate on whether using just water or a mix of water and soap is best for your face. When you look online, there is a lot you are supposed to place on your face daily, including cleansers, toners, moisturizers, serums, and more.
While all of this may work for some people, and make their skin feel better, it ends up hurting some people, more than helping. If you have sensitive skin, you may find yourself breaking out more, experiencing dry skin, and having skin that feels rough instead.
Perhaps you have even tried dozens of different kinds of products made for a bunch of different skin types and still experience negative side effects with your skin.
Theoretically, using high-quality cleansers that have benefits like being low pH, non-stripping, and hydrating your face is best. But these cleansers can be very costly, outside of most people’s affordability, and lower quality soaps or improper face soaps can be more harmful than helpful.
If that is the case, you may want to try just washing your face with water, at least most of the time. There are a few benefits of washing with just water, but there are also steps that you need to follow to make sure you are cleaning as much as you can.
The benefits of washing your face with water include:
• It saves time
• Can improve skin health
• Saves you money as you don’t have to buy as many products
• Allows the microbiome of your face to continue to flourish
• Doesn’t strip the oils from your skin as much
• It is simple and you aren’t using chemicals on your face
When you wash your face with just water, you want to make sure the water is at least lukewarm, but closer to warm is best as it helps remove the sebum and oil that is building up in crevices and pores. Additionally, using a microfiber cloth can help as you can be gentle with your face and not need to scrub it as much to get the same amount of gunk off.
It should be noted that although many people have found positive results with this method, it isn’t recommended by doctors. Soap is meant to help remove a lot of what is on your face, including pollutants, dirt, debris, and oil that will clog your pores. Sometimes, using water may not get rid of everything on your face and cause a buildup of material.
Another solution is to alternate whether you are washing your face with water or soap. Since you aren’t going out at night and getting more pollutants on your skin, washing your face with just water in the morning works fine.
However, you can try to use a gentle cleanser at night, after you have been out getting sweaty and dirty.
This allows you to reduce the number of harsh cleansers you have on your face, while still making sure you are able to remove the pollutants from the day. If it is a day you have stayed inside and don’t have a lot of pollutants, you may be able to just use water as well.
This is probably the best method, as you reduce the amount of cleanser you are putting on your face, while also making sure you are getting fully clean.
Start with just alternating, using cleansers at night and water in the morning to get your face clean. Try this for a couple of weeks and see how you feel. From there, you can adjust. You may find you only have to skip soap once or twice a week to get good results.
You may also want to look at double cleansing and see if doing that before washing your face with only the water next time helps.
