Rich and hydrating oleo-gel cleanser that replenishes and restores / 3.4 oz 

Symbiome’s The Renewal Daily Cleanser is the first product in Symbiome’s lineup that we knew we needed. Great oil cleansers are hard to come by, and this non-foaming oleo-gel is particularly great: its nutrient-dense fermented oils melt away excess sebum, makeup, and sunscreen while respecting skin’s natural microbiome and replenishing it with much-needed nutrients.

To fully appreciate how unusual The Renewal is, you’ll have to read Dara’s interviews with Symbiome’s founder, Larry Weiss, about his work with the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon and his work with fermented plant oils from their environment. The quick version: Larry sourced these oils after three expeditions to study the members of a disease-free, semi-nomadic tribe in the Amazon that boasted unusually good health, unusually good skin, and as he discovered, a dramatically more diverse microbiome than most of us have.

According to Larry’s research, we’re missing about 80% of the “good bacteria” found on the skin of the Yanomami—bacteria that do very important work. Primarily, they a) provide significant antioxidant protection, and b) help regulate of a broad range of systems in the body that are essential to its health and resilience.

The precision-fermented blend of oils in The Renewal, which come from sustainably harvested plants that grow in the tribe’s milieu, is rich in specific postbiotics. They contain the fruits of the labor done by these very busy good bacteria: lipids, phytosterols, and antioxidants that are essential to skin health but that skin often has trouble creating on its own. As Larry noted during his discussions with Dara, these postbiotics provide more predictable and consistent results than probiotics ever could.

As Larry told Dara during one of their chats about this product in particular, “Skin was never meant to have surfactants on it—the ingredients you’ll find in typical lathering soaps. The squeaky-clean feeling that they give you actually means that you’ve stripped all the sebum off of your skin, but that sebum is there because it’s optimized to protect you.

“The Yanomami have no surfactants in their world. But here, where we use SPF and makeup that we need to wash off at the end of the day, you need a cleanser; the texture of The Renewal is similar to sebum, but it’s looser so that it can dissolve whatever you’ve put on your skin without leaving it stripped of oil. It leaves a healthy, clean layer on the skin that resembles sebum. That’s why, after you use it, your skin is going to feel different than it does after using a typical cleanser.”

It does feel different, and for some people, it may take some getting used to. But if your skin is chronically dry and/or sensitive, you might find that getting-used-to period to be one of genuine relief.

This vegan, organic formula is free of added fragrance, but its blend of plant oils gives it a very subtle, soft scent of almond pastry and soft earth that we love.