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Question: What's the difference between manual and chemical exfoliation?

Answer:

Exfoliants help to remove dead skin cells from the surface of your skin. There are two types of exfoliants: manual and chemical.

Manual

Manual exfoliation is when you actually scrub your skin with something. It could be a scrub you buy at the store, a homemade scrub, or even a simple washcloth. You can make your own home made scrub by adding jojoba beads to your cleanser. Some people suggest using aspirin or baking soda. Or using Clarisonic or a facial brush.

Chemical

Chemical exfoliation is exfoliating with chemicals (such as BHAs, AHAs, and retinoids) that help shed your skin faster. In my experience, I prefer chemical exfoliation over manual exfoliation because manual exfoliation is too harsh for my skin. Even though it seems like chemicals would be really harsh, they are actually a bit gentler in my opinion because they don’t cause a lot of the physical irritation caused by manual exfoliation. While manual exfoliation depends on scrubbing and rubbing to remove dead skin cells, chemical exfoliation seems to just melt/dissolve the dead skin cells from your skin.

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