Thumbs up: Mac Cleanse Off Oil

Mac's skincare is something I don't tend to think about much - after all the brand is mostly all about colour and limited editions and while I've tried a couple of things from the skincare side of things over the years, I haven't been that wowed. But given my love of oils, I thought that their Cleanse Off Oil would be worth a go.

So, is it?

Yep, this is good. It's not as good as the Shu Uemura version it so closely resembles, but it out-performs any other I've tried, like Lancome's Huile Clarte, Chanel's Precision Huile Confort Silky Cleansing Oil and Keraskin Esthetics' Huile Nudite. Mac Cleanse Off Oil can cope with anything from barely-there to a night-time face full of makeup really well and will take it all off with around three pumps worth of product.

It does struggle a bit with waterproof mascara (or even just the 90 coats of regular I like to use) but you can gently rub it right into lashes without stinging and with a bit of persistence it'll shift any last traces. At first, I was a but unsure as to how well it actually did clean, so I did a double-cleanse to test and nothing came back off on the muslin cloth, so I'm pretty reassured it's whipping everything I want it to whip off, off.

So, any downsides? A couple. You may need to keep an extra bottle of eye makeup remover on hand for particularly welded-on eye makeup and I have noticed some congestion around my chin in the couple of weeks I've been trialling it. To put that in context, because I so rarely deviate for long from my beloved Eve Lom, which cleanses and exfoliates, my old gunky chin problem is no more and I rarely now need to use a separate exfoliating product. So it's not a criticism of the Mac Oil at all, just the way my skin is and how I've learned to handle it.

All-in-all, if you're a fan of cleansing oils, then I think you'll find this is a pretty decent product. Cost? €23 for 150ml at a Mac counter near you!