For a girl’s night, a friend and I decided to try a homemade charcoal facial mask. It’s a peel-off mask which claims to extract the blackheads and grime from your pores when you remove it. You’re supposed to be able to see it all on the mask after you peel it off, and we were intrigued.
All you need is three Nature’s Way activated charcoal pills (which can be purchased at any local drug store), liquid Elmer’s glue, a medium-sized paintbrush, and a small container for mixing the concoction. I was a turned off by the thought of Elmer’s glue, but each of the five YouTube tutorials we watched gave us the same material checklist. Each video assured us that it’s nontoxic and safe to slather on your face, so we decided to overlook it.
We used scissors to open the charcoal pill capsules and poured the contents into a liquid glue mixture. We blended the mixture until it reached a dark gray consistency. Then, we painted it all over each other’s faces, careful to avoid our eyes and hair. We applied a thicker coat in areas where blackheads were prevalent.
We let it dry for about forty minutes. Our faces were frozen—we couldn’t even open our mouths to laugh or purse our lips to blow on each other’s masks! We were ready to get this stuff off, and we began peeling it from the bottom to the top. The chin area was fine until I got to the peach-fuzz zone around my jawline. My heart sank into my stomach because I realized that the next fifteen minutes were going to be hell.
The glue was stubborn and the only thing I could do was rip it off in short, excruciating increments. Some of it had gotten into my eyebrow and a small portion of hair was ripped off. My roommates were doubled over laughing at the sight of two screaming girls desperate to yank a layer of Elmer’s glue off their faces. An R.A. came to my door to see if there was an emergency because we were screaming.
We finally got it all off and nothing, no blackheads or grime, had appeared on the mask. Our faces were hot, red, and throbbing for about an hour. Our skin wasn’t soft for two days, but this might have been because we ripped off a layer or two.
Later I found out the glue could be substituted for egg whites, ugh! I’ll never forget this experience—and neither will any of our friends who witnessed the fiasco. So don’t make a homemade charcoal mask, or at least don’t use glue!