Clogging or Non-Clogging: How to Choose the Best Soap for Your Skin

When you consider your next purchase of a facial bar, make sure you avoid soaps that will clog your pores. Teens especially should choose a soap that does not aggravate their overactive sebaceous glands by further clogging their pores.

Understanding the properties of the oil that is used to formulate your facial soap is very important to your purchase. Advertising is misleading. Many oils that are touted for skin use such as cocoa butter, coconut oil and wheat germ oil are the most comedogenic, or pore clogging because they are the highest in saturated fats.

Generally speaking, soaps made of soft oils or unsaturated fatty acids, have less chance of clogging the pores. Since the various vegetable oils used to make soap are a combination of saturated and unsaturated fats, the manufacturer needs to choose oils that contain the highest percentage of unsaturated fat. Look for oils like olive oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, flax seed oil, and hemp oil in the ingredient list of your soap. Soybean oil in particular is not pore clogging because it contains 70 -80% unsaturated fatty acid.

Water is another important factor for the results you achieve in washing your face. Avoid hard water or water with too much acidity. When the calcium and magnesium ions in hard water interact with soap, a wax like non-soluble precipitation will form that clogs the pores. Warm water will open pores to clean them and is not harsh to the skin like hot water.

One must consider all the factors to choose an appropriate soap.

This is a general guide for non-comedogenic, or non pore clogging ingredients based on user and soap makers’ experience.

Low Clogging Probability	Medium Clogging Probability	High Clogging Probability
Almond Oil (Sweet Almond)	Corn Oil	Cocoa Butter
Anhydrous Lanolin	Cottonseed Oil	Coconut Oil
Apricot Kernel Oil	Crisco	Sodium Chloride (salt)
Avocado Oil	Glyceryl Stearate SE	Wheat Germ Oil
Beeswax	Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil	Extra Virgin Crude Pressed Oil
Bentonite Clay	Mink Oil
Candelilla Wax	Soybean Oil
Castor Oil	Sulfonated Castor Oil
Cetearyl Alcohol
Emulsifying Wax NF Emu Oil
Evening Primrose Oil
Glycerin
Hydroxypropyl Cellulose
Jojoba
Kaolin Clay
Olive Oil
Peanut Oil
Polysorbate 20 and 80
Safflower Oil
Sesame Oil
Stearic Acid
Sunflower Oil
Tocopherol
Aloe Vera (cold pressed)