Three Hydrating Cleansers, Two Centuries Observed

One finds, in this century, that the vocabulary of skincare has become quite elaborate. There are “serums” and “essences” and a product called a “toner,” whose function I have, after considerable study, accepted on faith. My doctor in 1819 did not have any of these. He had a number of things that, in retrospect, I would not recommend.

What I can recommend, after two centuries of observing the living conduct their morning rituals in the rooms I happen to occupy, is that one chooses a cleanser before all else. The cleanser is the foundation upon which the rest of the edifice rests. A bad cleanser undoes the work of every serum that follows, and the serums, as I have mentioned, are quite elaborate.

I have not, you understand, any personal need of these things — the dead keep a complexion that no cleanser could improve or spoil. What I have instead is time, and a great deal of correspondence: the reviews arrive to me the way letters once did, by the hundred, and I read them all. From the reactions of the living, and the testimony of those who trouble to write things down, I have watched which of the three below deserves a place on the washbasin. My complexion is not the evidence here. Theirs is.

The first I would recommend to anyone whose skin has not yet declared itself a particular way — what the women of my time would have called “a constitution of moderate sensibility.” The second I would press into the hands of anyone whose skin is, as the contemporary phrase goes, “reactive.” The third is what I would purchase if I had no further information and simply wished to be done with the decision.

A cleanser does not labor alone. The dryness these formulas guard against is often the room’s fault as much as the skin’s — the winter air in these old buildings is merciless — and I keep opinions, filed elsewhere, on the humidifiers worth running through the dry season. The ritual deserves its objects, too: a teaware set meant for one suits the slow hour a proper cleansing wants. And what follows the washbasin is the pillow, for which my colleagues have notated the weighted blankets that persuade a restless night to hold still.

That is the whole of it. I have outlived my doctor, my century, and every fashion in the washing of a face that came between — and of the three, the CeraVe is where I would send a person who asked me once and did not wish to ask again. The reviews and I are, for this rare instance, in complete agreement. I have all the time in the world to change my mind; I do not expect to need it.