ELF - brownbettybella review for Holy Hydration! Makeup Melting Cleansing Balm

🪺elf SKIN—Mini Holy Hydration! : Makeup Melting Cleansing Balm🪺 Sizes/Retail: Mini | 0.45oz | $5 🧪KEY ACTIVES * Hyaluronic Acid * Ceramides (Ceramide 3, Ceramide 6 II, & 1 more) * Peptides (Palmitoyl Tripeptide-1) 💬CLAIMS A solid cleansing balm that melts into a luxurious oil to easily melt away makeup. After washing it leaves the skin feeling silky smooth and soft. *Great for: normal, dry, oily, and combination skin 🔬 elf SKIN: Mini Holy Hydration: Makeup Melting Cleansing Balm is a cleansing balm that will melt away the long day’s makeup for a squeaky-clean feel. This solid makeup removing cleansing balm melts into a luxurious oil, then transforms into a nourishing, milky texture that rinses off clean. Formulated with skin-loving ingredients like hyaluronic acid, ceramides and peptides. Your skin will feel silky smooth, and soft. 🧬SKIN TYPE: Dehydrated, Acne-prone, Oily-Combination 💭GENERAL THOUGHTS vs. CLAIMS This is actually the first cleansing balm I’ve used before. So my experience is completely with inexperience in using cleansing balms in general. I’ve known of cleansing balms for a long while, but the thick-balm like state of them seemed like an occlusive heavy nightmare for my acne prone skin. I used this balm for a couple days to test and see how it’d help with my hydrating my dehydrated skin. Immediately I noticed that there’s no apparent scent, or rather it’s neutral. Which was a bit interesting because they didn’t specifically label this as fragrance free (there’s still a dreaded non-specific “parfum” ingredient) but they do have products they do make note to state are fragrance free. So the fragrance is not so prominent in the final product (likely due to linalool) but it’s their FYI for my sensory/sensitive skin people. I then applied this on dry skin, I didn’t use a water based cleanser afterwards because I didn’t want any possible interference with the cleansing balm. When I first grabbed some to apply it carries on thick and waxy on the hands/fingers. Once I rubbed it on dry skin it did in fact melt into my skin. On the skin it results in a oily greasy finish which didn’t feel luxurious to me lol, and made me think I’d have to work to wash this off. As I applied it I really focused on massaging it into my skin and then I washed it off. I was sure I’d have to really work to wash this off my face but it came off without much fuss. It washed off into a milky substance. My skin didn’t feel squeaky-clean like claimed which is a good thing! Squeaky clean to me is unnecessary and in my experience really primes skin to eventually lose that necessary oil-water balance. My skin instead was clean but smoothed and slightly noticeably softer than *before*. So my dehydration was controlled. But overtime though as I used this for the next several days alongside the non-fragrance free face cream; my cheeks/pores began to look noticeably congested and looked splotchy like the heads of pimples wanted to form. I got a random breakout on my side of my cheek closer to my jaw so a hormonal breakout is also likely co-occurring but my cheeks looking as they did was my tell tale sign to stop using this. The price makes this a maybe try for non sensitive skin folks but either way I wouldn’t say to use this on the whole face.