My skin is not a sensitive creature. Not at all. It doesn’t get along well with every product I’ve ever put on it, but there’s never been an ingredient that always, without fail, made my face break out – well okay, there’s two others, anything derived from rosemary and anything derived from mangoes, but that’s because I’m allergic to both of them. Even things like coconut oil or isopropyl palmitate or lauric acid – all notorious for being really comedogenic – don’t make me break out. Now if I’m writing a post on this, that probably means that something went horribly, horribly wrong there and I realized I may have made a fatal error at some point.

Turns out, there’s one really baffling thing my skin completely hates: Mineral oil. Yes, the thing that’s in (or more accurately is) baby oil and known for being sensitive. Mineral oil, despite being completely non comedogenic, makes my face break out in huge, painful cystic acne. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know either.

“Well that’s strange,” I thought about a week ago, “The most recent thing I’ve added to my routine has been my Banila Co. Clean It Zero, and the only thing it has in it that could cause this is butylene glycol which I already know I’m not sensitive to.” But this isn’t my first rodeo and I know that there’s a lot of people who will argue until their last breath that mineral oil causes some serious acne, despite scientific evidence saying the contrary. I’m very pro-science, I studied microbiology in college, but humans are weird creatures and every one of us reacts to different things, despite our skin being made of all the same stuff as everyone else. YMMV is an acronym that comes up a lot in skincare circles, and it’s true: Your mileage may vary so far from my own experiences that we might as well be a different species when it comes to our skin.

So, little scientist that I am, decided to put this to the test. I went across the street to the Duane Reade and got myself a bottle of pure mineral oil and started using that instead of my Clean It Zero. My face somehow managed to get worse in the past several nights since I started using it, with a whole variety of cysts on my chin, blackheads chillin’ on my nose and in between my eyebrows, closed comedones on my cheeks, and whiteheads lovingly caressing my forehead. Needless to say, when I woke up this morning, my reaction was a colorful assortment of four-letter words. And picking the hell out of my face because I am a child who should not be trusted with the responsibility of having fingernails.

My skin hates mineral oil. It hates it a lot. And thus, because it’s the very first ingredient, my skin also hates the Banila Co. Clean It Zero.

There is at least a bright side: I’m evidently not alone, hence the existence of the mineral oil free version of this product: Clean It Zero Purity. I might try it out after I run out of the rest of my Etude House Real Art Cleansing Oil, but I also have a bottle of The Face Shop Rice Water Cleansing Oil that I’m really excited to test out.

Now, if you’re not sensitive to mineral oil, Banila Co. Clean It Zero is a really great oil/balm cleanser. It removes makeup so amazingly well that I still really want to like this cleanser and say something good about it despite it making me break out worse than a hormonal teenager. My girlfriend can use it without any issues and she might honestly love it more than she loves me. My plan for how to deal with this minor disaster is actually pretty simple: The Clean It Zero is just going to become a makeup remover for me. I have another few eye and lip makeup removers that I really enjoy, but when I really go crazy with the foundation and concealer (like how I’m going to have to for the next several weeks while my face heals), sometimes my normal cleansing oils don’t manage to take it all off in one go.

So what I’m going to do is just take off heavier makeup with the Clean It Zero, and then clean that off with a cleansing oil. On days when I don’t wear such heavy makeup, I’ll just skip it. Sure it’s a bit of a pain to add a third cleansing step, but honestly, the ability to clean off my face completely without scrubbing it or making it break out like crazy is worth it to me.

And this is the main reason I have not and will not do a review on this product; because it is 100% an ingredient issue for me and not an issue with the product itself, I don’t want to say anything negative about it – what happened to me probably won’t happen to you. It would be like me writing a bad review of the steak place that helped me figure out I was deathly allergic to rosemary, it wasn’t their fault I had to go to the hospital and spend the night on an antihistamine drip; it’s just not a fair assessment.

So, what ingredients make your face absolutely freak out?