Vol. IV · Column 04 · Skin · HowTo Beauty Edition

On the second cleanse, and why I do it.

The most underrated minute of my week. Sixty seconds, twice a day, that have done more for my face than any serum I have ever paid for.

Words by Nelly, Beauty & Style Director · Friday, 11 April 2026 · 8 min read · Filed under Skin.

Photographed at the desk, late evening. The second cleanse always happens here, never at the sink. Photography by Cem Aydın.

What it is.

There is a minute, twice a day, when I take everything off my face. Not most things. Everything. The makeup, the SPF, the air of London, the meeting I shouldn't have taken. Then — and this is the part nobody talks about — I wash my face again.

That second wash is the entire piece. It is the difference between skin that looks rested and skin that looks like it survived the day. I have been doing it for nine years. I will be doing it on the morning I die, assuming I have any say in the matter.

The second cleanse is not a product. It is a step. The cleanser changes; the cleanse does not. I have used a dozen oils and twice as many gels. I will use a dozen more before I am done. The argument is structural, not commercial — and that is, in part, why nobody sells it.

The minute, in detail.

The first cleanse is an oil. A balm, technically — the kind that comes in a small glass jar and feels, on the cheekbone, like an apology. You warm it between your fingers. You press it onto a dry face. You move slowly, in the way you would move if you were trying not to wake somebody. Two passes around the eyes, one across the forehead, one along the jaw. Then a damp cloth. Not muslin. A cotton flannel, the kind your mother used.

The point is not to scrub. The point is to ask politely, twice.

The second cleanse is a gel — low pH, no fragrance, almost nothing else. A coin in your palm, water from the tap (tepid, never hot), and forty seconds of small circles. Rinse. Pat. Don't rub. The whole thing takes a minute and twelve seconds if I am being slow, fifty-four if I am tired. I have timed it. I am insufferable.

The cloth I use is a cotton flannel from a hardware shop in Beyoğlu. It cost the equivalent of one pound. I have eight of them and I will fight anyone for an opinion on muslin. The cloth is replaced after every use. The cloth is washed at sixty degrees with the towels and, occasionally, with the gym kit, which is a confession I am putting in writing for the first time.

Why most people get this wrong.

They use the wrong oil. They use a foaming cleanser as the second step, which is the cosmetic equivalent of pressure-washing a cashmere coat. They scrub. They use water that is too hot because they want to feel something working, and a cleanser is not supposed to feel like work — it is supposed to feel like nothing, ideally, and then your face is supposed to feel like itself again, only quieter.

The other mistake is doing it once. Once is enough to remove the day, technically. But it isn't enough to finish removing the day. There is a film of sunscreen and city that lives, after the first wash, just under the cheekbones — the place where your hand naturally rests when you are tired. The second cleanse takes it off. The first cleanse opens the door. The second cleanse is the conversation.

The third mistake — the hardest to see in oneself — is treating the cleanse as a thing you do at the end. It is the beginning. It is the foundation under everything you put on top of it. I have watched people layer five hundred pounds of serum onto a face that was not properly washed and wonder why nothing is working. The serum is fine. The serum has nothing to work with.

What changed, for me.

The first month: nothing visible. The second month: my skin stopped being shiny by 4pm, which I had assumed was a permanent condition of being thirty-one and Turkish. The third month: people started using the word rested, which had previously been reserved, in conversations about me, for sarcasm. The sixth month: I stopped buying serums. The ninth month: I gave most of my serums away.

What I didn't expect — and this is the actual reason I'm writing it down — is what it did to the rest of the routine. When the cleanse is right, everything after it does less work. Moisturiser becomes one product instead of three. Foundation becomes a tinted balm. The whole top half of my bathroom shelf became unnecessary, and I have not missed any of it once.

I should also say what didn't change. My genetics are exactly where they were. My pores are still where they have always been. My eleven o'clock fine line is, like its owner, slightly older. The point of the second cleanse is not transformation. The point is that the day stops accumulating on your face.

If you can only change one thing.

Skip the toner. Skip the essence. Skip the third serum you bought in the airport in Seoul on the recommendation of a girl you didn't know. Skip the eye cream, which is moisturiser in a smaller jar at four times the price. Add the second cleanse instead. You will know within six weeks whether I am right, and you will know within twelve whether I have any further credibility on this subject.

I should warn you that nothing about this is dramatic. There will be no before-and-after. You will not post about it. You will, however, stop noticing your skin in the wrong way, which is almost always the goal — to stop noticing — and which is a thing most beauty writing forgets to say out loud.

Three notes I'd pin to the bathroom mirror.

Order. Oil first. Then a low-pH gel. In that order, always. Reverse it and you've washed your face for nothing.
Temperature. Tepid. Hot water is a story we tell ourselves about feeling clean.
Frequency. If you only do this three nights a week, you will still see the difference by month two. Daily is the goal. Three is the floor.

The questions I get asked.

Do I really need to double cleanse if I don't wear makeup?

Yes. Sunscreen, sebum, and the air of any city over five million people are exactly as cleansing-resistant as foundation. If you are wearing SPF — and you should be — you are wearing something that needs to come off properly.

Can I use the same cleanser twice?

You can. The result is not the same. The first cleanse exists to dissolve oil-soluble debris (SPF, sebum, makeup); the second exists to clean the skin underneath. A balm cannot do the second job; a low-pH gel cannot do the first. Two cleansers, one of each kind, is the answer.

Does any of this matter for younger skin?

It matters more. Most of the damage that becomes visible at thirty-five was inflicted between fifteen and twenty-five. The cleanse is the thing you wish you had started.

What about acne-prone skin?

The same logic applies, with a steadier hand. Pick a non-comedogenic balm — squalane-based, no fragrance — and a low-pH gel marketed for sensitive skin. Avoid anything with menthol, citrus oil, or the words refreshing or invigorating on the bottle.

Is this just the Korean double-cleanse?

It is. The technique was popularised by the K-beauty boom of the early 2010s and existed in Japanese cleansing protocols for decades before that. I am not claiming I invented anything. I am claiming most people in the West skipped the second cleanse on the way home from Seoul, and that is the part of the import that mattered.

Morning and night, or just at night?

Just at night, properly. The morning cleanse, for me, is a single low-pH gel — no oil. There is nothing to dissolve at 7am except the night's moisturiser, which a gel handles perfectly well on its own.

The product I will not name (yet).

Three balms I keep re-buying. The fourth one I won't tell you yet. I have a rule: I write about a product after I have used it, end-to-end, for at least ninety days. Not before. Not because of who is paying. Some of the most repeated brand names in beauty writing are the ones I have used the least. That is a separate piece, for a separate week.

From the desk · Series and columns.

This piece is column 04 in The Second Cleanse — a column on the quietest minute of skincare. Other writing from this desk includes The Wardrobe Schematic (style as system, five colours, ten shapes), Skin First (the long game, patience as protocol), and Unedited — a closing column that posts on the last Friday of every month, in her own hand, no second drafts.

About the author.

Nelly is the Beauty & Style Director of HowTo Beauty Edition. She has spent the better part of fifteen years writing about other people's faces, and now writes about beauty as a subtractive practice — fewer products, longer arguments, and the case for owning the things you actually use. She files three columns a week from Istanbul, London, and the desk. Find her between posts on Instagram at @legacybynelly.

The HowTo Network.

Lanes on this site.

The argument, in short.

There are three claims in this column, and I would like them named so you can disagree with each one separately. The first is that the modern skincare routine is too long, and that length itself is a kind of damage — for the skin, for the wallet, and for the time we have between waking up and answering an email. The second is that the cleanse is the only step that, done well, makes the rest of the routine shorter rather than longer. The third is that doing the cleanse twice — first with an oil, then with a low-pH gel — is the part that turns the cleanse from a chore into a result.

If you take only one of those claims and try it for a season, take the second. The other two will follow on their own, if I am right. They will not, if I am wrong, and you will have lost ninety seconds a day to a polite Turk on the internet. There are worse ways to spend an autumn.

Cited and worth reading.

The double cleanse method, as adapted from Korean skincare protocols of the early 2010s — see the original Get It Beauty primers if you read Korean.
Pamela Marshall, & Lloyd-Brown, S., on barrier-first skincare and the case against over-exfoliation — Get the Gloss, 2022.
Caroline Hirons, on the cleansing flannel as the unsung hero of British dermatology — Skin Rocks, multiple essays.
Dr. Anjali Mahto on cleansing-induced barrier disruption (The Skincare Bible, Penguin, 2018).
The original Vogue Beauty desk archive, 1994–2008, on the cold cream as the spiritual ancestor of the modern oil cleanse.

None of the above are paid links and I would not change my answer if they were.

The other contributors on this site.

This is a community edition. The argument for the second cleanse is mine; the argument for the eight-step routine, somewhere on this site, will not be. Read across. Disagree often. Pick the one that fits your face and not your inbox.

Nelly · Beauty & Style Director — Istanbul / London
Skin lane editors — moisturising, exfoliation, SPF, barrier care
Makeup lane editors — base, eyes, lip, finishing
Hair lane editors — porosity, density, scalp, styling
Body lane editors — skincare beyond the face
Fragrance lane editors — wearing, layering, archiving

The Sunday note.

I send a short note on Sundays, around 7am Istanbul time. One thing I am thinking about, one thing I am wearing, and a sentence on what I would skip first if I had to start the bathroom shelf over from nothing. No tracking. No partners. No five-step beginner's guide hidden under a paywall. Sign up, or do not. The columns are public either way.

A note on language.

This column is published in English, on the English edition of HowTo Beauty. The argument is, as far as I can tell, language-agnostic — the cleanse exists in every climate, in every market, in every face that has had a long day — but the writing has been edited for a reader of English and may, in places, sound more London than Beyoğlu. I would like to translate the column into the seven other languages of this site eventually, but I will not do that with a translator I have not read in the original. The Turkish edition will come first. The Arabic, second. The rest, in order of how long the queue is.

Archive · The Second Cleanse column.

A closing thought.

Most beauty writing tells you what to buy. This column tells you what to do, and what not to. The product is incidental. The step is the thing. If you keep the step, you can change the product whenever something better comes out, or whenever the brand you trust gets bought by a conglomerate and quietly reformulates without telling you. The step survives the product. That is the entire argument of this column, expressed in a single sentence, fifteen years too late.

I will write the next column from the same desk, in slightly better light, with the same cloth and a different gel. I will tell you what I changed, and why. Until then — wash your face, again. Yours, in three coats of mascara — N.