Soap & Glory – The Ultimelt Hot Cloth Cleanser – A Liz Earle Cleanse & Polish Dupe?

Recently the cleanser I had been trying out came to an end a little quicker than I’d anticipated. I did my morning cleanse and all of a sudden it was gone. With no time to order online, and nothing in my Stock Room Drawer (the drawer where I keep backups of things, products to try out etc) I made a dash to Boots on my dinner break to see what I could source quickly that wouldn’t upset my skin too much.  

My local Boots is really rather limited, but they did have a few things that caught my eye, one being the Soap & Glory stand they had set up showing off the skincare range. The Soap & Glory skincare has had a makeover recently, and I’ve gotta say, I’m loving the packaging. I thought I loved it before, but for some reason there’s just something about simplicity that makes me think ‘yep, I trust that near my face’. Just me?  

I spotted The Ulimelt Hot Cloth Cleanser, and as a big fan of the Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish (review here) I wanted to take a closer look. The ingredients are certainly appealing, it contains essential oils (orange, lavender, clary sage, rose and geranium) and sweet almond and coconut oils – all things I already know are fantastic in skincare, and I’d actually been using an almond cleanser before it abruptly ran out, which was fantastic for sensitive skin, so I thought I’d definitely give it a shot.  

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I’m quite pleased with it. Scent wise, it’s actually almost similar to the Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish, although the ingredients are different, the Liz Earle offering smells of rosemary, chamomile, cocoa butter and eucalyptus, but it’s the same sort of natural scent, and I like them both equally in that respect. I don’t think I’d pick one over the other, in terms of smell.   It is perhaps a little bit less thick than the Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish, but this isn’t really a good or bad thing, just something I’ve noticed. The experience of using it is essentially the same, and I’ve been using it as a second cleanse after removing my makeup. I haven’t actually tried using it to remove eye makeup as that’s usually a pointless exercise (I wear a lot of mascara).  

My skin definitely seems to like it, it’s very gentle and well… my skin was breaking out pretty badly before, and it did get a little better for a while. I’m extremely hormonal and also full of flu as of writing this, so my skin is an absolute crisis zone right now, but the situation did seem to calm for a while.   I took a peek at the ingredients lists for this next to the Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish and the ingredients are actually very similar.

Besides having a different set of essential oils in the mix, the ingredients are really close, so it’s no wonder they seem so similar.   It retails at £10 for 100ml and the Cleanse and Polish is £14.75 for the starter kit, so pound for pound the Soap & Glory offering is definitely cheaper than the Cleanse and Polish starter kit, although you can get 100ml of Cleanse & Polish for £13.25 without a cloth. I managed to grab The Ultimelt on offer for around £6, so if you can find this on offer like I did it’s definitely a good product to grab as an affordable dupe, but ultimeltly (hurrr) if you disregard price I guess it really comes down to a matter of personal preference.  

Have you tried either or both of these? What were your thoughts and which did you prefer?