Adventures In Beauty - DIY Blackhead Mask

...or, "The Great White Stink"


I am a girl who has never been knowledgeable in many beauty products or beauty routines. Nor have I been very adventurous. My hair is curly and thank God because if it were straight it would most likely just hang there like a limp noodle. I've never spent two hours on my hair in the morning, which is why I don't straighten it. I'd have to wake up super early, straighten it...and then use more products to poof it back up again. That's too much damn work for this single mother at 5 in the morning.

That in mind, I am on the hunt for no muss no fuss beauty rituals you can do at home, quickly and on the cheap. I have yet to find a solution to my hair always looking the same, but I have stumbled across some really interesting facials, foot scrubs, nail polish colors, beauty organization tips and other things along those lines. Previously establishing that I have no talent in the beauty department, I am here to test these tips I find from "expert" girls to see how easy they are to apply to real life and how well they get the job done.

Today's task was a made at home blackhead removal mask. The ingredients/instructions were:

1tsp Milk
1 tsp Unflavored Gelatin Mix
Put a hot cloth over your face to open your pores. Dry off face completely before applying mask.
Heat milks and gelatin on the stove until thick
Apply with a cotton swab (I used a facial sponge) while mixture is warm, not hot.
Allow to dry completely. If it feels gel-like, it is not dry yet.
Peel off the mask and your blackheads.

Here's how it went...

I started with my full face of makeup

Used Facial Cleansing Towelettes to remove everything

Clean face

I decided to also exfoliate with Simple Exfoliating Facial Wipes. Just to make sure my face was good and ready for this mask.

Then I gathered my ingredients. Milk and unflavored gelatine.

The instructions say to use a hot towel on your face to open your pores. I have never found a good method for this so tonight I tried just microwaving a dry towel. Seemed to work. 

I mixed my ingredients (1tsp milk and 1 tsp of the gelatine)

I quickly applied the hot towel to my face

I decided to use a facial sponge to apply the mask, because a q-tip seemed like it would turn into a cottony disaster. Well it turns out that it is very hard to keep the mask warm enough to stay in a liquid state and not hot enough to burn your skin off while you apply it. This dried way too quickly and I wasn't able to get any on my face. It also didn't seem like enough. So I repeated the warming process, but this time I doubled the recipe, making twice as much. Somehow I got it to stay liquid while I ran to the bathroom mirror with the pot and the facial sponge. Now, this stuff STINKS to high heaven. It just stinks. Bad. It's gross. And I'm not gonna lie, the first touch of it going onto my face burned me. It was still too damn hot. But I needed to cover my face with this crap and I knew it was going to gel up any second. By the third touch of it to myface, it had cooled considerably and was still liquid enough to be spread everywhere. How you are supposed to get the timing right on this is beyond me.

So here I am all masked up and waiting to dry.

A few minutes later my whole face mask was dry to the touch and ready to be peeled off. If you look at the picture below, you will see right in the middle, this mas actually extracted some (for lack of a better word) pimple juice right out of my face. Something that wasn't even on the surface of my skin yet.

At times, it was difficult and a tad painful to remove. 

The worse parts were where the mask had already started to gel while I was still applying and did not go on thick and evenly across my face. That was a lot of picking to get off as much as I could. To loosen it up, I would open my mouth wide and it would start to bust apart.

Looks like something Stan Winston created

Warning: This mask stops at nothing!! Here you can see that it removed, root and all, a good portion of my eyebrows! Well...at least it saved me a trip to the salon.

When it was all said and done, my skin felt absolutely amazing!!! Soooo smooth and baby soft. It was fabulous. But as I was looking at the mask peelings, I did not see one blackhead attached to it. So, the mask did not serve it's intended purpose. It removed zero blackheads, but it did manage to bring some more to the surface. *eye roll* I'm not quite sure what it actually did, but my face felt GREAT!!!

It left a big ole' mess though.

Post mask. Would I use this mask again? Hell no. It is not worth the effort. This is one at home project that I would actually recommend just going to the drug store and buying an over the counter blackhead removal mask or some pore strips. I remember using them in junior high and I always really liked them. 

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go scrape all this hardened gel shit off my kitchen pot.