Lukewarm water and the face

For most of my adult life I had washed my face with the water set to whatever the tap was already running. In the morning that was usually cold. In the evening, after a hot shower, the bathroom was warm and the water came out hot, and I washed my face with whatever was at hand.

About two years ago I changed this. The change came after a small offhand comment from an aesthetician who was treating my skin for a different problem. She said, in passing, that the water I was washing my face with was almost certainly too hot in the evening and slightly too cold in the morning, and that my skin would prefer if I made an effort to keep both at the lukewarm middle.

Why this matters

Hot water strips the natural oils from the skin more aggressively than warm water does. Cold water does not strip oils but it does cause a brief vasoconstriction that, in some skin types, makes the small redness more pronounced through the day. Both extremes are mild stresses. The skin recovers from each of them without much trouble. The point is that the recovery costs something, and over years of daily exposure the costs add up.

Lukewarm water — about the temperature of a baby's bath, which is the standard description, and which is about thirty-five degrees Celsius — is the temperature at which the cleansing happens without the additional stress. The makeup and the day's grime come off. The barrier stays intact. The skin walks away from the wash in roughly the state it was in before the wash.

What this looked like in practice

I had to add about thirty seconds to my evening routine. Instead of using the water that came out of the shower head, I now run the tap separately and adjust it. I check it with the inside of my wrist before I splash it on my face. The thirty seconds was hard to remember for the first month and then it was automatic and now I do not think about it.

The morning was easier. I just stopped using the cold tap directly. I run the cold for ten seconds while the hot kicks in and then I have lukewarm water within twenty seconds. The lukewarm wash in the morning has been, I think, the bigger of the two changes. My skin in the morning is no longer slightly flushed for the first hour after waking, which was something I had assumed was just my face waking up and which turned out to be the cold tap.

What changed

Slow and small. The redness across my cheeks went down over about three months. The barrier function — which I have no formal way to measure, but which I can feel as the absence of late-afternoon tightness — improved. My moisturisers seemed to work better, which was probably them doing the same work on a less stressed surface.

If you have been washing your face with whatever water came out of the tap, try lukewarm for a month. It costs nothing. It might be the cheapest skincare improvement available.