Cleansing brushes: who they are wrong for

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Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

Foreo Luna 4

A cleansing brush is a mechanical exfoliant that has been sold to you as a cleanser.

That is not an accusation. Most of these devices do exactly what their makers say. It is a description of the category, and once you read it that way, almost all of the confusion about who should own one goes away.

What it is actually doing

Cleansing is a forty-second job. The cleanser lifts the day off, the water takes the cleanser away, and there is not much room in there for a job to be done badly by hand.

What a brush adds is friction. Bristles or silicone nodules oscillating across the outermost layer of skin, taking a little of it with them. That is exfoliation. It is a real effect, it is why skin feels immediately smoother, and it occupies exactly the same slot in a routine that an acid occupies.

Which produces the most common mistake in this category by a wide margin: buying a brush while already running an acid, or a retinoid, or both, and then using all of them.

Bristle or silicone

The two halves of the category differ less in what they do than in what they cost you to keep.

Bristle heads are the older design. They deliver more friction, and they are a consumable — the manufacturer will tell you to replace the head every three months, and that advice is not purely commercial. A damp brush head living in a bathroom is a damp brush head living in a bathroom.

Silicone holds far less water, has nothing to replace, and delivers less friction over the same run time. Whether "less" is a drawback depends entirely on which of the two lists below you are on.

Either way, do the annual arithmetic before you buy, the way you would with anything that takes refills. The device has one price and owning it has another, and the second one is the one you pay repeatedly. It is the same sum we ran on pads against a bottle and a cotton round, and it comes out the same way: the recurring number is the real number.

Who they are wrong for

Anyone already using an exfoliating acid or a retinoid. Which is most of the people buying one. Two exfoliants stacked is not a stronger routine, it is a shorter one, because skin that gets angry stops the whole routine for a fortnight. If congestion is why you are shopping, an acid was built for precisely that and it does not need charging.

Anyone with rosacea, or skin that flushes easily. Friction and warmth are the two things that skin wants least, and a brush is both.

Anyone in the middle of a bad barrier week — the tight, stinging, flaking state. A brush at that point is more of whatever caused it.

Anyone with active inflammatory breakouts. You would be dragging a vibrating head across them, and then putting the head back in a warm damp room. Work around them or leave it in the cupboard.

Anyone hoping it goes faster with more. The temptation runs in a predictable direction: an early improvement, then a plateau, then the urge to raise the frequency — which is the point at which people tend to overdo it. Mechanical exfoliation has a ceiling and the ceiling arrives early.

Who they are actually right for

Someone wearing heavy makeup or a thick sunscreen every day, who is double-cleansing anyway. On a genuinely dirty face the brush is doing real work rather than inventing some.

Oily, resilient skin that has never stung from anything in its life.

Someone who will not use an acid — because of pregnancy, because it stung, because they tried and disliked it. A brush is the mechanical route toward roughly the same destination, and choosing it deliberately is a perfectly good decision.

Someone who cannot tell when they have finished. A timer that buzzes between zones is worth more than it sounds if the real problem is a sixty-second cleanse being done in eight.

On the numbers in the advertising

There is no agreed definition of "clean" for a face. Which means the comparison figures printed on these boxes — so much cleaner than washing by hand — are the maker's own measurements against the easiest available comparator.

Hands alone is a low bar, and it is not what you were doing anyway. You were using a cleanser.

Read those figures as marketing rather than as lies. They are usually true, and they are answering a question nobody asked.

What it will not do

• It will not make a cleanser work better. A cleanser is on your face for under a minute and then it is in the drain.
• It will not do anything for congestion that an acid would not do more thoroughly, more evenly, and without a charging cable.
• It will not reach the bumps that sit deep. Nothing at the surface does.

The one thing that decides whether this works

Frequency, and the direction to move it in is down.

Two or three times a week. Never on the same evening as an acid. Never twice in a day, whatever the box says about morning and night.

The people who get on well with these devices are almost always using them less often than the instructions suggest, and the people who conclude the whole category is a con are almost always using them more.

The product

It is silicone rather than bristle, so there is no head to replace every three months and nothing damp living on the shelf, and it sits at the gentler end of the category — which is the correct end for most of the people who want one. The ownership cost is the purchase price and then nothing, which is the whole argument for this half of the category.

The one people are searching for is the Foreo Luna 4.

Foreo Luna 4

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.