As a beauty aficionado, I am always on the hunt for what’s hot and poppin’ on the beauty scene. For a while now, I’ve been seeing other beauty junkies wax poetic on the virtues of micellar water and all of the wonderful and glorious things it can do. Passively, I thought that it was just a glorified facial toner, but I slowly realized that people swore by these products! Some have even ditched their cleansing gels and creams and have replaced them with micellar water.
So what exactly is micellar water? While surfing the web, I saw an explanation on the PopSugar website that describes micellar water as “somewhere between a toner and a cleanser, micellar water completely removes makeup, dirt, and oil from the skin without stripping your complexion.” As for its origins, micellar water has been around for over 100 years and was popularized in France back then because the water supply was terribly harsh (read more about the history of micellar water at Elle.com.) back then.
The one micellar water I am most familiar with is the Bioderma Crealine H2O. Pick up any magazine article on makeup artist or beauty editor “must haves” and, inevitably, someone will mention that the Bioderma Crealine H2O is the one product they can’t live without.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to try it. A friend of mines visited Paris last summer and I gave her a laundry list of beauty products to bring back with her and the Bioderma Crealine H2O was at the top of the list. When I received it, I tried it immediately. Initially, I wasn’t that impressed. But as I started to use it more, the more I started to like it. It was easy to remove a day’s makeup and very gentle on my oily skin. I could even remove a fair amount of eye makeup with the exception of some waterproof mascara and eyeliner. For that, I used my trusty Artistry Eye and Lip Makeup Remover up to clean up stubborn eye makeup.
When I ran out, I didn’t think about replacing it until I began seeing micellar water popping up in a number of skin care brands lately. While running into my local CVS, I discovered the new Garnier SkinActive Micellar Water and decided to pick up a bottle. The day after I bought that Garnier version, I spotted an H&M Beauty Micellar Water, too. So I purchased it.
While the micellar water does a good job of gently removing makeup, I’m still not sure if I would be up for replacing my usual cleanser altogether. But I can definitely see this going into my gym bag when I need to remove makeup prior to sweating like a pig in my HIIT class (insert giggle)!