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Actress Chloe Grace Moretz went from grow­ing up with ​“really bad” cys­tic acne to being the face of this fal­l’s Coach fra­grance cam­paign and hav­ing her skin deemed ​“flaw­less” in Self. Olive oil deserves much of the credit, she revealed in an Allure inter­view.

Cys­tic acne is char­ac­ter­ized by large, highly vis­i­ble pim­ples that are deep, painful and often leave scars. Deal­ing with the con­di­tion was a ​“long, hard, emo­tional process,” Moretz told Allure. In her quest to over­come it, she switched beauty prod­ucts, changed her diet and took Accu­tane, a vit­a­min A deriv­a­tive that’s pre­scribed for extreme skin prob­lems.
See more: Olive Oil Health Ben­e­fits
These days, Moretz relies on a sim­ple and nat­ural skin cleanser. ​“I wash my face with olive oil. I swear my skin is so much clearer because of it,” she told Allure.

Moretz isn’t the only actress who uses olive oil for top­i­cal skin care. Emma Stone told Style­caster she has sen­si­tive skin, is aller­gic to a lot of stuff and can ​“really only use prod­ucts with one thing in them.” So, she keeps a big bot­tle of olive oil on her sink and uses it for her face.

Celebri­ties are well-known for tout­ing exotic and unortho­dox beauty tricks, but oil cleans­ing is a phe­nom­e­non that’s been gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity beyond Hol­ly­wood, and many skin­care pro­fes­sion­als say it makes sense because oil attracts oil. When you apply a cleans­ing oil, it attracts impu­rity-laden oils that are already on the skin and clog­ging the pores and you can eas­ily rinse them away.

Olive oil is a ​“great choice” for face wash because it cleans with­out strip­ping the skin’s nat­ural oils, Ava Sham­ban, M.D., founder of SKINx­FIVE der­ma­tol­ogy cen­ter told Self. Com­mer­cial cleansers often strip away the nat­ural oils, which can dry the skin and cre­ate an imbal­ance that kicks oil pro­duc­tion into hyper-drive, caus­ing more skin prob­lems.

Olive oil is also loaded with lipids and antiox­i­dants, and has anti-inflam­ma­tory, anti-aging and nour­ish­ing prop­er­ties. One way actress Car­olyn Mur­phy man­ages her ​“super sen­si­tive and dry” skin is to slather olive oil onto her body, she told Into The Gloss. And when Allure asked Emily Blunt for a beauty secret, the actress revealed she soaked her face in olive oil to soften her skin.

While some peo­ple praise olive oil, there aren’t any one-for-all solu­tions with skin care. Olive oil is mod­er­ately come­do­genic, mean­ing there’s some risk it could clog the pores. There­fore, using it solo on the face may not yield stel­lar results for every­one.

It may be good for those with dry skin or eczema, but ​“I would not rec­om­mend this for patients with oily skin, acne, and those with enlarged pores or acne-prone skin,” Gary Gold­en­berg, M.D., med­ical direc­tor of the Der­ma­tol­ogy Fac­ulty Prac­tice at the Icahn School of Med­i­cine at Mount Sinai, told Self.

• Self


• Allure