Dr. Perry's CleanThyme® Cleansing Bar

It is hard, if not impossible, to find a perfect soap. I’ve been unable to recommend a particular brand of soap for my patients, and so I spent over a year creating the best possible skin cleaner.

CleanThyme is technically not soap, because it is acidic like the skin. Soaps, by definition, are alkaline, with a pH over 7. Alkaline soaps irritate the skin, and allow dangerous bacteria like Staph, to proliferate. CleanThyme has the same acidity (5.5) as the skin.

You might be used to a liquid cleanser, but I chose a bar instead of a liquid because preservatives are not required in bars. Since about 14% of people are allergic to preservatives, I wanted to leave them out of CleanThyme.

You won’t find many low pH cleaners in stores because these products usually do not perform well. And that means you won’t like them and so you won’t buy them, even if they are better for you. So my challenge was to make CleanThyme “user friendly” – to make you want to use it. I hit a home run with this one - once you try my CleanThyme, you’ll find it difficult to go back to your old products. It performs exceptionally well. Here’s why:

Most soaps use sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) for lather, but SLS is a known irritant. If your skin is tight after a shower, it is probably being irritated by either SLS or another closely related chemical. I left these out of CleanThyme and to give it lather, I used quillaja, made from the soapbark plant. This is the same natural substance that makes root beer frothy. To give the bar a nice feel, glycerin and oatmeal were included. I’m not a fan of fragrance, but the honest truth is all skin cleaners need them – you just wouldn’t use the bar or liquid soap or cleaner without fragrance. My task was to create a natural fragrance and when I combined lemon, lavender, and thyme oils, an irresistible fragrance emerged. You might have heard that lemon oil is a photosensitizer, but I found a form of lemon oil with the photosensitizer (bergaptene) removed. (Don’t worry – I read the organic chemistry literature so you don’t have to!)

When you start your day with the right pH skin cleaner, without SLS and other irritants, there should be less of a need to use all those other products that are designed to reduce irritation, like toners and moisturizers. (They actually do the opposite – they can cause irritation...) So, CleanThyme should simplify your skin care regimen.

Finally, many people ask me if CleanThyme is a facial or body cleanser. Another skin care myth is about to be dispelled... There should be no difference between a facial and bath bar. Skin is skin. Generally the smaller bars fit on your vanity better and so they are called facial bars and the larger bars take longer to dissolve in the shower, and so they are called bath bars. We’ll call the bar you see here a facial bar and we’ll make a giant bath bar next year...

Arthur W. Perry, MD, FACS