The key difference between these make-up remover cloths and regular washcloths is surface area. The dense pile is made of many small threads, so there are a lot more threads in cloth than if they were normal sized. Surface area is important for a few reasons:
1. Friction. To lift the make-up from the skin, the fibres need to grip onto the make-up and pull it off. The greater the surface area, the more grip and friction each wipe will have without you having to push down so hard – instead of 5 large fibres going over a particular area, you get 50 fibres. It’s like with shoes – a shoe with a perfectly flat sole is going to have worse grip than a shoe with a ribbed sole, which has a better surface area. This means the cloth will remove more makeup with less irritation.
2. More thorough cleaning. Smaller fibres can get into cracks too small for normal cloths, and can get under finer particles of make-up.
3. Adsorption. If there’s enough friction, the make-up will lift off the skin, but then it’ll just be smeared around unless the cloth can grab onto it. Luckily, at a molecular level, everything is quite sticky with adhesive forces (technical term: van der Waals forces). Because there are so many fibres, these cloths can bind to dirt and hold it better than a normal cloth.
Geckos can walk on glass for the same reason – their toes are ribbed to give them a higher surface area, so they have stronger adhesive van der Waals forces with the glass, making them grip. Adding warm water to the removal process helps loosen make-up as well.
So try it today and watch the dirt and makeup of the day simply wipe away!
