Micellar waters are a very fancy name for a mild cleanser with the following characteristics: they have mild surfactants (or cleaning agents); are non-foaming and contain moisturising ingredients.
You can read about the technical detail on how micellar water or facial cleansers work at this BLOG.
What am I testing and why?
I am road-testing Nivea’s micellar water -sensitive skin, specifically the claim that it removes make-up.
Before photo
After applying a copious mix of waterproof, pigmented and shiny make-up, my forearm looked like this:
I then pressed down a pre-soaked (in micellar water) cotton pad on the above patch and counted to 5. Finally, I wiped over this area (quite firmly) exactly 4 times.
After photo
Most of the make-up remains, including the Tom Ford eyeshadow, Kay Beauty eye thing and the kajal. What is surprising is the serious dent its made on the pigmented lipstick. It’s more effective on lip colour than most micellar waters I have tested.
The ingredient label…
The surfactants (whose main function is cleaning away the make-up) are Decyl Glucoside (same as Forest Essentials) and Poloxamer 124 (which is a lighter version of Poloxamer 184). Both these ingredients are listed half way down the ingredient label, indicating to me that there is definitely not much of either surfactant.
I like both surfactants as they are super mild, but in an attempt to create a super-mild formula, Nivea are reducing the surfactants and that doesn’t produce an effective make-up remover.
To buy or not to buy?
This is one of the cheapest micellar waters and definitely punches above its weight. (The third ingredient is grape seed oil, which is a fabulous ingredient). However, from a purely make-up removal perspective, its main competitor, Garnier SkinActive Micellar Water is more effective. As just a micellar water, this has close to 20 ingredients, while more effective French pharmacy brands have 10 ingredients. There are just better products out there…sorry Nivea.