How to Choose the Best Soap for Your Skin Type

Just like every other relationship in your life, you can’t love your skin properly if you don’t understand it. 

Your epidermis is beautiful, complex, and unique. This means your skincare needs are probably not the same as your mom’s, your sister’s, or your best friend’s. In order to get the glow you’ve been missing, you need to determine what your skin needs.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for, but there are techniques that are likely to help with your specific skincare challenges. And there is one skincare tip that always applies no matter what your skincare type is or what you hope to accomplish with your cleanser:

Always choose natural ingredients. Always.

Natural solves a host of problems. After all, so many of our skincare issues come from interference with nature. Make-up and pollution clog our pores, harsh chemicals strip moisture from our skin, and hormonal changes throw our complexion all out of balance. Washing with natural ingredients is an important step towards helping your skin find its way back to a state of natural health and beauty.

That said, here are some more tips to keep in mind when shopping for soap.

The Best Soap for Oily Skin

Oily skin happens when your sebaceous gland gets a little over-eager and produces too much sebum. Sebum is the oil that makes your skin soft and supple. It’s a good thing in moderation, but too much of it leads to shine, clogged pores, and acne.

A lot of people with oily skin fall into the trap of using harsh soaps loaded with chemicals in an attempt to vanquish acne. While we get the impulse to go all “scorched-earth” on pimples and oil, chemicals are never the answer. Not only can they irritate your skin or cause an allergic reaction, but chemical-laden products often dry out your skin too much. When your skin becomes too dry, those sebaceous glands panic and create even more sebum. Not the desired outcome.

Instead, choose all-natural products with ingredients containing antioxidants and antibacterial properties to fight acne. You can often find these in plant-based oils such as olive oil and coconut oil. Also, look for a cleanser that lists “glycerin” among the ingredients. Glycerin is non-greasy and hydrates your skin without adding shine. When you use a soap containing glycerin, you wash away dirt and grime without drying out the skin, which means your sebaceous gland can just take it easy and let your skin find its own balance.

The Best Soap for Dry Skin

Whether it’s eczema or just run-of-the-mill dry skin, nobody likes having a rough and rugged epidermis. And if you’ve struggled with dry skin for any length of time, you may be giving up on the dream of finding a soap that will actually hydrate your skin instead of stripping it of the natural oils it needs.

Here’s the trick. You want to find an all-natural soap that contains three important ingredients:

Emollients, occlusive oils, and glycerin.

Emollients are found in natural oils like argan oil and coconut oil. They work at the cellular level, filling cracks in your skin with lipids to smooth out the surfaces and make you feel radiant again.

To get your occlusive oils, look for a product containing a heavier oil like sesame or olive oil. Occlusive oils trap moisture against your skin, creating a barrier that protects the surface against forces like hot water and dry air that usually strip hydration away.

You’ll know if a product contains glycerin because it will say so directly in the ingredients list. Glycerin is basically a moisture magnet, drawing moisture from within your skin up to the surface.

Find a cleanser that contains these three ingredients, and you’ll be golden.

The Best Soap for Combination Skin 

If you’re not sure if you have combination skin, here’s a quick definition:

Skin that is oily in some areas and drier in other areas is known as combination skin. If we’re talking faces, many people struggle with oil in the T-zone (forehead, nose, and chin) while the rest of their skin is normal or dry. 

Figuring out how to care for combo skin is never easy. Do you treat the oily skin or dry skin?

Well, you have options. You can get products geared toward oily skin and products geared toward dry skin and wash those areas separately. Another possibility is to choose a mild soap formulated for the problem that plagues you more and use that soap exclusively.

The third option is to look for a gentle soap with natural ingredients that meet the needs of both oily and dry skin. Sound impossible? If you read the sections above for those two skin types, you may have noticed that both oily and dry skin benefits from the non-greasy, moisturizing properties of glycerin and the anti-bacterial properties of plant-based oils like coconut oil and olive oil. You can find this perfect balance in Le Lores’ Organic French Olive & Coconut Oil Body Wash and in the Natural & Organic Olive Marseille French Soap.

The Best Soap for Normal Skin

If you have normal skin, you are one lucky duck. In skin terms, “normal” means you have no problems to solve. Your sebum production is well-regulated. Your skin is not too dry and not too oily. Somebody blessed you with good genes. 

Don’t get too comfortable, though. Sometimes people mistake normal skin for invincible skin. But just because you don’t have problems now, it doesn’t mean you can’t create them. If you’ve been blessed with a balanced complexion, your job is to make it easy for your skin to maintain that balance. This means choosing gentle cleansers with all-natural ingredients. You are more than welcome to use mild soaps with moisturizing properties, but steer clear of any cleansers that are aggressively formulated to reverse oily skin or dry skin, since you do not have those challenges.

The Best Soap for Sensitive Skin 

Sensitive skin needs the gentlest love. This means all-natural ingredients, ideally certified organic products, and absolutely no chemicals whatsoever. You also want to avoid perfumes, alcohol, and colorants.

When you have to avoid so many ingredients to avoid irritating your skin, it can feel like you’re missing out on the very best in skincare. Walk down any beauty aisle, and you see bottle after bottle, bar after bar, promising you the softest, most radiant skin of your life. 

The truth is that treating skin with only natural ingredients is also the most reliable route to supple skin and a clear complexion. Natural oils work with your skin’s natural physiology to cleanse and hydrate gently, without stripping away moisture or clogging pores.

In fact, no matter what your skin type is, the most important thing to remember is that your skin is not the enemy. You won’t get the best results from launching a heavy-duty attack. Instead, approach it gently and with love.

If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend checking out Le Lores. Our soaps are all-natural, certified organic, and made in France. No harsh chemicals or synthetic fragrances. Just kind, loving care for your unique skin.