I have a tendency to — quite frequently, too frequently? — point out my favorite products. And it won’t surprise you to hear that my favorite cleanser, always, is Dara’s Water.

I use it year-round, but I’m particularly grateful for it during the spring and summer months, when many of us use sunscreen more liberally. Every time I apply my SPF (always mineral-based, sometimes tinted), I’m struck by how hard it is to wash off of my hands. Have you noticed that, too? Even with a serious hand soap, there’s probably still some left on your fingers; it’s even less fun to remove from any towels you might be drying your hands with afterwards.

And when you wash your face at night, it can be similarly hard to fully remove your sunscreen. It’s not a bad thing: daily sunscreen is always a good idea, and your sunscreen needs to stay on your face to do its job). And it's not as though it's a life-threatening situation; if you’re too tired to double-cleanse your face at the end of the day, all of the sunscreens on our shelves are OK to sleep in on occasion. 

BUT: if you’re applying a great, power-packed product on your face at night — our best-selling Dara Kennedy Sea Retinal, perhaps, or the Marie Veronique Multi-Retinol Night Emulsion, or de Mamiel Gravity Fix, or Luzern Crème NUIT, or TWELVE Ideal Brightening Corrective Serum — you’ll get a lot more out of it if you’re applying it to a cleaner canvas, where it can be more readily absorbed. And I always want you to get the most out of your products.

So, here’s an experiment you can try at home: apply your mineral sunscreen, notice how tenacious it is on your hands, and then swipe a cotton pad or muslin cloth with Dara’s Water on it over that residue. You’ll find that it's swept up immediately, with no scrubbing, tugging, or drama. This is a good thing for your face, too: it doesn’t love drama.

Then you might wonder, “What is IN this stuff that makes it take off sunscreen and even eye makeup so easily?” 

Good news: just gentle ingredients, intelligently combined. (Dr. Pedro Catala, the creator and master formulator behind TWELVE, really knows what he’s doing.) To show you how gentle it is, Pedro’s written a guest post on our blog where he breaks down every ingredient in the formula and what it does. As with everything Pedro writes, it’s fascinating and peppered with funny Pedro-isms, such as, "I am aware that this tone might sound very self-promotional, but today I feel very unapologetic and I would like to decipher for you, in plain Spanglish, why Dara's Water is the black horse in the cleansing category."

Check it out here. Gracias, Pedro, for being so generous with your knowledge and your gifts, and for making the most beautiful of cleansers just for us.

xx
Dara