Sodium hyaluronate is the second-to-last ingredient in this tub, after two lake dyes and just before a konjac gum and a pH adjuster, in what is essentially the water droplet suspended in an oil balm. It is also the second word on the front of the packaging, the reason the product is teal, and the basis for a claim of twenty-four hours of hydration. That gap — between where an ingredient sits and where the marketing puts it — is the most Garnier thing about the product, and it would be a problem if the balm were bad. It is not. It is, in fact, one of the better cleansing balms sold for under twenty dollars, for reasons that have nothing to do with the hyaluronic acid and everything to do with the seventeen ingredients above it.
Garnier is a legacy mass-market house, French since 1904 and L'Oréal's since 1965, and when it entered the cleansing-balm category in 2024 — a decade after prestige and Korean brands made the format a ritual — it did so with the parent company's emulsifier chemistry and a mass-retail price. The Erase It All line came in two versions, vitamin C and hyaluronic acid, and they share a base; the actives are the only difference, and in a rinse-off product the actives are the least important thing in the tub. What matters in a cleansing balm is three things: what dissolves the makeup, what turns the oil into something water can rinse, and what the skin feels like afterwards. On all three, this balm is well built.
The dissolving is done by ethylhexyl palmitate, the first ingredient and the bulk of the solid — a light, dry-feeling ester that takes apart foundation, long-wear mascara and the filters in a water-resistant sunscreen on contact with a dry face. Polyethylene gives the balm its firmness in the tub; shea butter in fourth place and jojoba oil a little lower make the melt silky and buttery and leave a whisper of lipid behind. The rinsing is handled by a proper emulsifier system — PEG-20 glyceryl triisostearate, PEG-30 dipolyhydroxystearate, polysorbate 20 and PEG-40 hydrogenated castor oil — which is where cheaper balms fail and this one does not: the moment wet fingers meet the oil it turns to a thin white milk, and the milk rinses away completely, taking the makeup with it and leaving no film. The after-feel is soft, faintly conditioned, not tight and not greasy on normal and dry skin. There is no fragrance, which at this price is unusual and welcome, and the brand's ophthalmologist testing shows — it can be massaged over closed eyes to melt mascara without a sting.
The hyaluronic acid does what a trace of hyaluronic acid in a rinse-off does, which is go down the drain. The soft feeling afterwards is the shea and jojoba. The brand's suggestion to leave the balm on for ten minutes as a mask is really an invitation to let the plant lipids sit a while, and it is pleasant enough on a dry winter face, but nobody should confuse it with a hydrating treatment; the moisturizer applied afterwards is where the hydration comes from, and a leave-on hyaluronic serum does more in a minute than the balm does in ten. The two lake dyes, blue and yellow, exist only to make the balm teal and match the box. They are approved colourants, they rinse away, and they are still two ingredients that a fragrance-free product aimed at all skin types did not need.
Where the balm asks for care is oily and acne-prone skin. Ethylhexyl palmitate and shea butter are both moderately comedogenic when they stay on the skin, and while the emulsifiers remove the great majority, a rushed rinse or a very oily face can be left with enough residue to matter over weeks. The fix is the one every balm user learns: emulsify thoroughly, rinse well, and follow with a gentle water-based second cleanser on nights with heavy makeup or water-resistant SPF. Dry and normal skin can often skip the second step on light days. Fungal-acne-prone skin should look elsewhere; the esters and polysorbate are not its friends.
The tub is the tub — 119 grams, a screw lid, no spatula, and the hygiene compromise of wet fingers in a jar for months. At fifteen dollars, used nightly, it lasts three to four months, which puts the per-night cost in cents and the value case beyond argument: this is the cleansing performance of balms three times the price, minus the fragrance most of them carry, from a brand with more than a century of making cheap things well. Six hundred and fifty reviews on Garnier's own site at 4.6 stars, and a place on every mass-retail shelf since 2024, describe a product people re-buy.
So: for anyone who wears makeup or sunscreen and wants a first cleanse that removes all of it gently, without fragrance or eye sting, and leaves dry or normal skin soft, this is a very good fifteen dollars and a better product than its front label. Buy it for the emulsifiers. Ignore the hyaluronic acid. And if your skin is oily or breakout-prone, keep the second cleanser handy and let the balm do only the first half of the job it is genuinely excellent at.
