One of the things about being a girl is the constant need to take care of your skin, cleaning – without soap, and moisturizing – without oil.

The cleaning part is pretty clear cut, in the sense that soap is bad for your face and other cleansers are preferable. But the story on moisturizers is quite murky. I spent a day giving myself a large migraine trying to sort out what ingredients should and should not be in my moisturizers, and what products pass the test.

I found many a warning from “organic” websites and other health experts to the effect that cosmetics companies are sneaky, underhanded businesses that use petrolatum or similarly cheap ingredients, and then dress them up in an exotic way to fool you into thinking they are good moisturizers, when in fact they are evil. Petrolatum, they say, strips the skin of its moisture, prevents it from breathing and expelling toxins and doubles the national debt.

But the American Academy of Dermatology and the Mayo Clinic, both relatively impartial observers say that not only is petrolatum an excellent moisturizer, it is either non-comedogenic or only mildly comedogenic. In other words, unless you have oily skin, it won’t clog your pores. I observed that many of the more exotic oils are far more comedogenic, including coconut oil, which is prescribed by some huckster natural-health skin doctor with a line of merchandise to peddle.

Which, in fact, is one of the things I found pretty uniformly among those good-earth types – they recount the horrors and harm of the ingredients that are found in basically every moisturizer you will find in your drugstore, and then come to your rescue with the perfect formulation. My advice: don’t you believe it!

My grandmother had the face of a 50-year old past her 90^th birthday, and she used Ponds, which is basically petrolatum. Long life, smooth skin, cheap price. Beat that!