A while back, while I was wasting an exorbitant amount of time on Pintrest and pretending that I was one of those do-it-yourself, creative types, I found a pin about cleaning your face with oil called the oil cleansing method or OCM. I had already been using natural products such as coconut oil and jojoba oil for my daughter’s hair for a while so I was interested and pinned the page. Like many of my pins, that is as far as I got.

Recently when I was at a gathering with friends, a good friend who is in her 50’s responded to a compliment about how great she looked by saying that she never put anything on her face that she would not put in her mouth. Makes sense right? It made me think that while I am very aware of what I put in my body eating very little processed food and lots of fruit and vegetables I was not paying that much attention to what I put on my body.

So I went back to Pinterest to look up the pin about OCM which led me to this blog post:

Clean Your Face Naturally with Oil (yep oil!)

The blogger does a great job of explaining the science and the benefits of good quality oils on the skin and gives the recipe of how to make a cleansing mix. The gist of it is that oil dissolves oil. The clean natural oil removes the dirty oil from your skin without stripping the natural oils that your skin needs to feel and look great. Although I am not a scientist, this made sense to me and the idea of using a natural product on my face was very appealing.

It took me several months to get around to putting a little bottle together so I could try this out. There are numerous recipes with different oils and quantities depending on your skin type on the Internet. I ended up choosing olive oil and castor oil with tea tree oil, simply because I usually have all those ingredients on hand and it worked with my skin type that tends to be oily. I followed a recipe that called for equal amounts of extra virgin olive oil and castor oil and added about 10 drops of tea tree oil to make a small bottle and began using this potion to cleanse my face at night.

To wash my face my before bed routine consists of using about a tablespoon of the oil mixture to rub all over my face, I then massage the oil into my face using gentle pressure. The last step is to wet a washcloth with very warm water, squeeze out the excess water and gently wipe the oil off. This process also steams my face leaving it soft and also feels absolutely amazing and relaxing.

After about a week I became a complete covert. This routine has made my skin feel great and soft and I no longer felt the tightness on my face that I felt after washing with a cleanser. The oil mixture also proved to be a great makeup remover and has the added benefit of costing pennies to make.

What products do you use in your skincare regimen?