The whole oil cleansing thing seems so bizarre to me, especially as a sensitive, oily, acne-prone skinned person who wholly refused to moisturize until I started using a prescription retinoid 2 years ago. I understand, and agree with, the chemical principle of like dissolving like, but... residue! How are you supposed to get all that residual oil off your skin without following up your oil cleanse with a proper cleanser?! Ain't nobody got time for that! I tried oil cleansing a whole of one time. I believe I mixed up 7 g of grapeseed oil and 3 g of castor oil (supposedly a good mix for oily skin), rubbed it on my face, and then scrubbed the bejesus out of my skin with a facecloth trying to get all the oil off. I'm pretty sure that within 30 minutes I had gone back and re-cleaned my face with a normal surfactant-based cleanser. It just wasn't for me.
So I read the ingredients of the Eve Lom stuff. Colour me skeptical when I saw that the first ingredient is mineral oil. Cheapest. Ingredient. Ever. Anyway, I kept reading and saw that her product contains not just oils, but also emulsifiers (a couple different PEG lanolins). That's where I started to see the light. I still think that the "all natural" oil cleansing is kind of bunk, especially for oily-skinned people, but if you add an emulsifier to your cleansing oil, that will increase its solubility - and therefore rinse-ability - in water. So it might actually come off your skin.
I decided to have another go at this oily nonsense, so I whipped up a super-simple pseudo-dupe of the Eve Lom cleanser, complete with 75% mineral oil. I substituted PEG-40 castor oil for the PEG lanolins, since it's the most similar emulsifier I have, and threw in some cetearyl alcohol and cocoa butter. I added the tiniest amount of clove and eucalyptus essential oils, and that was it.
Per the instructions of both Eve Lom and Caroline Hirons, I applied the stuff (similar consistency to Burt's Bees hand salve, if you are familiar with that) to my dry face and gave it a good rubbing-in. It felt oily. I wet a facecloth in hot water, wrung it out, and held it over my face for a few seconds. I repeated this step a few times, since the heat is supposedly essential for oily skin as it allows the cleanser to penetrate into my greasy pores. Following that I used my hot, wet facecloth to scrub the cleanser off, rinsing it a few times along the way. Lo and behold, my skin felt clean! Not oily! It was pretty remarkable. I felt like the balm rinsed cleanly off my hands too, and my facecloth did not feel like it was saturated in oil after rinsing. All so unexpected.
After drying my face off with a towel and giving it a few minutes to evaporate off the leftover moisture, I touched my skin. It felt really, incredibly soft.
Anyway, I've been at this for a few days now and haven't had any catastrophic results yet. I'll update if my acne explodes or anything, likewise if my skin suddenly becomes my best feature (a girl can dream, right?).
A note on facecloths: I've tried using them in the past, as my skin doesn't seem to react too well to the high levels of alcohol contained in most chemical exfoliants. I've always found that the added stimulation increases my oil production, and since starting prescription acne meds 2 years ago, I have stuck to hands-only cleansing with surfactant-based sensitive skin cleansers (either Cliniderm gentle cleanser or Cerave foaming cleanser). This system has worked quite well for me in combination with the meds, and Cliniderm protective lotion SPF 45 in the day or Spectro blemish-prone moisturizer overnight. I'm still using my meds and moisturizers and will switch back to my cleanser system if I have any problems... and probably when I run out of this balm, at least until I finish up the products that I already have.
UPDATE (Aug 8, 2016): So, after about 3 days of using this, I was developing 2 new pimples on my chin, boo. I went back to a regular cleanser the evening of Aug 5 and haven't had any new ones appear since then. Oh well, I only have one application of this stuff left anyway, maybe I'll use it up as a pre-cleanse and be done with it.
