My friend Joyce has been on a trip to the US recently and very kindly did some beauty shopping for me. She brought back these Olay Cleansing Melts and I’m sorry but they’re some kind of absolute magic!
Apparently, a decade in the making, the melts are one of the cleverest beauty products I’ve seen. I should say straight away that they’re only available in the US just now so we can’t buy them in the UK unless we have friends/relatives/distantcousins who might venture across the pond. The way that these little squares that feel somewhat like a slightly stiff piece of kitchen roll just disappear into a liquid gel is a bit of a mind bender. But, of course, there is a logical explanation.
The melts are produced by weaving ultra concentrated ingredients (manufactured into a long thread) sealed by a polyvinyl film into a kind of fabric-like square (may we just take a breath to consider the machinery and componentry that’s needed for this). Once you add a few drops of warm water to activate (and don’t add too much – it needs so little) the solidity just disappears and collapses into a liquid gel. The gel itself feels just like any cleansing gel and did a very decent job of cleansing my skin although I wouldn’t use it for removing make up, I don’t think.
It’s interesting because the beauty industry is chasing ‘waterless’ very hard indeed – and yes, you do need a couple of drops of water for it but waterless, industry speaking, is more about water within the production process and the product itself.
We don’t get to know the ins and outs of the exact production but presumably the ingredients started wet and were dried down. The entire box is recyclable but I’d suggest there is far too much packaging around the removable tray that holds the squares to be called truly sustainable but if Olay can reduce that down I think we are looking at something else entirely.
It’s $9.99 for 32 squares which feels reasonable to me. It’s not just Olay working on this technology so I think (hope) that this is the first of many ‘melts’ we might see.
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