Biossance Squalane + Antioxidant Cleansing Oil

This is the only true emulsifying cleansing oil we cover, and that is the whole reason to care about it. Plain squalane dissolves makeup and sunscreen perfectly well — it is a lipid, and lipids dissolve lipids — but it has nothing in it to make it leave. Pour squalane oil on your face and you have to wipe it off with a cloth. Biossance put two polyglyceryl emulsifiers in this one, so when you add water it turns milky and rinses down the drain. That sounds like a small distinction until you have tried doing a nightly cleanse the other way.

The ingredient list is better than the marketing suggests in one respect and worse in another. The good part: squalane sits 3rd of 19, behind caprylic/capric triglyceride and the first emulsifier — the highest position of any cleansing product we cover apart from The Ordinary's balm. Behind it is hydrogenated farnesene, the lighter hemisqualane-type emollient, which is what keeps the texture thin enough to spread over a dry face instead of sitting on it in a blob. Nineteen ingredients total is a short list for a cleansing oil, and the pack is 6.7 fl oz with a pump, which is the biggest of the cleansing formats here.

The part that decides who should buy it: this is a fragranced product, and the fragrance is the antioxidant story. Orange, lavender, rosehip, oat, evening primrose, moringa, lavandin, chamomile and sunflower oils all appear below the emulsifiers, along with rosemary leaf extract and tocopherol — and limonene and linalool are declared outright. Those two are the ingredients most likely to sensitize as a bottle ages and oxidizes, and you are rubbing this around your eyes. There is no fragrance-free version of it to switch to. If your skin or eyes react to essential oils at all, The Ordinary's Squalane Cleanser does the same job with nothing of the sort on its list, for a good deal less per ounce.

On texture it is genuinely pleasant. A couple of pumps spread over a dry face without dragging, long-wear makeup and sunscreen break down in under a minute, and the emulsification is clean rather than the half-hearted slick some cleansing oils leave. It does not sting the eyes in the way a surfactant-forward cleanser can, and skin afterwards feels soft rather than squeaky — which is the entire argument for cleansing with an oil in the first place.

Where it loses marks is value and the fragrance trade, not performance. It is noticeably more expensive per ounce than the drugstore foaming option, and the thing you are paying extra for — a blend of botanical oils acting as antioxidants — is also the thing most likely to cause a problem on reactive skin. That is an unusual position for a product to be in: the premium ingredient and the main drawback are the same ingredient. We score it well on texture and squalane position, and down on formulation and value, and we would point most people at the balm first.

Who it is for, plainly: someone who wears heavy makeup or a thick mineral sunscreen, wants a one-step oil cleanse that rinses properly without a cloth, is not sensitive to fragrance, and is happy to pay prestige pricing for a 6.7 fl oz pump bottle. That is a real person, and for them this is the best-engineered rinse of anything we cover. Everyone else — and in particular anyone with reactive, rosacea-prone or fragrance-sensitive skin — is better served by a fragrance-free balm.