Why Toner ?
Remember your high school biology ? Remember all about acids and alkaline ? Litmus tests, pH of 7 being neutral ? Skin has a great connection with this concept.
Your skin’s oil is slightly acidic. This means it has a slightly low pH. As it gets distributed onto the surface of your skin, the acidic nature of your skin’s oil helps to kill bacteria that falls on it. That’s why oil accumulates around your eyes, nose and mouth, aka the T-Zone - the oil gets solid, forming small blackheads, so that some oil should stay there on a permanent basis and protect these orifices. Once the solid oil builds up enough and gets an accumulation of darkened dead skin cells mixed in, it becomes visible, appearing as blackheads. If your skin’s pH gets thrown off and isn’t acidic anymore, it will over-produce oil in order to get it’s status back to acidic, which can make for more blackheads.
Now, if you take an alkaline substance (something with a higher pH) and mix it with fat, what do you get ? Soap! Most cleansers have a higher pH than the skin because most cleansers are alkaline. Some are the same pH as the skin but don’t cleanse well. Others are very high and get the skin squeaky clean but strip the skin like crazy and dry it out. The best cleansers clean the skin thoroughly while keeping the skin from getting dry. Either way, the possibility that the skin’s pH is going to get thrown off by a little or by a lot is fairly high.
That’s where toner comes in. The best toner is slightly acidic and therefore balances the skin so it doesn’t have to balance itself by producing more oil. Blackheads, and therefore breakouts, are kept more under control.
It also adds water to the skin which is a double bonus because the more hydrated the skin is, the more pliable it is, making skin soft enough for the oil not to get so solid and stick around for that long.
So, with toner you get skin balancing and hydration at the same time, making skin softer, producing less blackheads and giving hydrating moisturizers plenty of water to hold onto the skin. The best moisturizers have ingredients that attract water molecules to themselves and therefore bind water to the skin, which means if you apply it to skin that is damp from a balancing and nutrient rich toner, you end up with much better results from your entire skin care routine.
