Thermal water, and the nature it was always meant for

Thermal water is not mineral water in a spray can. It is rainwater that entered the earth decades ago, sometimes centuries ago, travelled slowly through rock, absorbed what the rock contained, and re-emerges somewhere with a stable composition that can be measured year after year.

What it is, before it is an ingredient

It is stability that gives it value, more than richness. Thermal water is regulated: its source is protected, its composition monitored, and it is bottled on site. Two neighbouring springs do not have the same water, and that changes what they do.

The so-called low-mineral waters, very poor in salts, are the ones most used on the face. Their purpose is not to bring much but to bring little — an almost neutral water disturbs nothing.

The more mineral-rich waters, sulphated or selenium-rich, are of another order and another use. They have a taste, a smell, a character.

What it does on a face

It prepares and it closes. Sprayed after cleansing, it restores a surface moisture on which everything that follows spreads more easily and sinks in faster. Sprayed at the end, on warm skin, it settles.

What it does not do: hydrate. Water that evaporates carries away a little of the skin’s own water — that is physics. Thermal water left to dry on its own dries the skin. It wants to be applied and then held, under an oil, a serum or a cream, within thirty seconds.

It is also one of the few skincare materials that can be used several times a day without consequence, and one of the few pleasant gestures that costs the skin nothing.

And yet, it has never suited everyone

The reading of the five natures places thermal water on the side of Metal — autumn, fineness, narrow reserve. Not by its matter but by its service: Metal is the nature that loses rather than produces, and the only one for which water applied and then sealed renders a decisive service.

The face of this nature is fine, clean along the jawline, economical. It never overflows. It dries out quickly on a plane, in a heated office, in a dry winter. For this face, water within reach is not a comfort: it is a tool.

For the other natures, it is a pleasure. A nature that produces a great deal will not get much from it; nor will a stable nature. A nature that runs hot will find relief in it — but surface relief, never an answer.

The delicate point

Thermal water is the gesture everyone can make and almost no one makes correctly. To spray and let dry is to do the opposite of what one thought one was doing.

And the question of whether this gesture is useful to you or merely pleasant depends on one thing: does your face lose, or does it produce. The answer seems obvious and it is not — a face can do both in the same week. What decides is the nature that has been yours from the beginning.