Blue nila and prickly pear face mask

Most clay masks make you wait them out. They go on wet, dry to a board, and by minute eight you are sitting very still and counting. TIFAWT does not do that. It stays soft the whole time it is on your face, which changes the whole ten minutes.

A tired looking face is usually a dry one. Skin that has lost water reflects light unevenly, and unevenly reflected light reads as dull. A mask helps by putting water back and leaving a smoother surface behind, not by taking anything away. Ours is the TIFAWT blue nila mask.

What a brightening mask actually does

Nothing in a good mask bleaches skin. What it does is hold water at the surface and even out the texture, so light comes back off the face evenly instead of in patches. You read that as freshness. It is a surface effect and it is temporary, which is exactly why it is a weekly step and not a treatment.

The part most masks get wrong is moisture. Take water out of skin and you can produce a matte face for an hour, then it goes flat again. Put oil and glycerin in alongside the clay and the result outlasts the rinse.

Blue nila and prickly pear, a Moroccan pair

Nila is the Moroccan name for indigo, a blue powder milled from the leaves of Indigofera tinctoria. In Morocco it sits on the shelf next to henna and ghassoul, and at home it is mixed with water into an occasional face mask. It is in the TIFAWT formula as Indigofera tinctoria leaf powder, thirteenth on the ingredient list.

Worth being exact about the colour, because plenty of sellers are not: the blue you see is CI 77510, a synthetic mineral pigment, third on the ingredient list. Nila is in the formula as the ingredient the tradition is built on, not as what makes it blue. The colour is colour. The oils and the clay do the work. There is more on the ingredient itself on the blue nila page.

Prickly pear seed oil, Opuntia ficus-indica, is the other half. It is pressed from the seeds inside the cactus fruit, and it is the reason skin feels soft after the rinse rather than tight. Around those two sit kaolin clay, which gives the mask its body and lifts oil from the surface, sweet almond oil, glycerin, and tocopherol, which is the antioxidant in the formula. The pH is between 5.5 and 6.0. The mask is fragranced.

If you are meeting these ingredients for the first time, our ingredients page covers what else goes into Moroccan care and why.

How to use it

Once or twice a week is enough. It is a reset, not a daily step, and using it more often does not get you there faster.

• Paint a thin, even layer onto a clean, dry face, and keep clear of the area around the eyes.
• Leave it ten to fifteen minutes. It will still be soft when you come back. That is the formula working as intended, not a sign it has not set.
• Rinse with lukewarm water, pat dry, and follow straight away with an oil or a serum to hold the moisture in.

Evenings suit it best, when skin has the night to settle.

TIFAWT, and how much of it you get

TIFAWT is built around this pairing, for a face that looks dull and does not want anything aggressive. The jar holds 200 g and a thin layer is all a face needs, so the arithmetic runs in your favour: this is the kind of jar you are still using long after you bought it. It is 59 KM.

We deliver inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Sarajevo, in one to two working days, and you pay cash on delivery when the parcel reaches your door. You can also buy it over the counter at our store in Sarajevo City Centar, Vrbanja 1, third floor, open daily from 10:00 to 22:00. If you are reading this from somewhere else, tell us where you are and we will write when we can send it to you.