Dial soap is not a good choice for washing your face. It’s a traditional alkaline bar soap designed for hands and body, and using it on facial skin can strip away protective oils, disrupt your skin’s natural pH, and leave your face dry, tight, or irritated. While it will technically clean your skin, it does so more aggressively than facial skin needs or tolerates well.
Why Bar Soap Is Harsh on Facial Skin
The skin on your face is thinner and more sensitive than the skin on your hands or body. It also produces a carefully balanced mix of oils that keep it hydrated and protected. Traditional bar soaps like Dial have a high pH, typically between 9 and 10, while healthy facial skin sits around 4.5 to 5.5. That mismatch matters: washing with an alkaline soap temporarily raises your skin’s pH, which weakens its outer barrier and makes it easier for moisture to escape.
Research comparing traditional soap bars to gentler synthetic cleansers (called syndets) shows a clear difference. After multiple washes with a traditional soap bar, both the protein and fat layers in the skin’s outer barrier show significant damage. Under the same conditions, skin washed with a gentler syndet cleanser stays well preserved. The soap-washed skin also loses water through evaporation at a much higher rate, which is a direct measure of barrier damage. That’s why your face might feel tight or flaky after washing with Dial: the outer barrier is temporarily compromised and moisture is escaping faster than normal.
The Antibacterial Ingredient Issue
Dial built its brand around being antibacterial, and some of its products historically contained triclocarban or triclosan. In 2016, the FDA banned 19 antibacterial ingredients, including triclosan and triclocarban, from consumer wash products. The reason: manufacturers couldn’t demonstrate that these ingredients were safe for daily long-term use or that they worked any better than plain soap and water at preventing illness.
Dial has reformulated many of its products since then, but the brand still includes fragrances, dyes, and other additives that can cause problems on sensitive facial skin. Triclosan, which was previously found in Dial Liquid Antibacterial Soap, is a known contact allergen. People with a triclosan allergy can develop redness, swelling, itching, and fluid-filled blisters, sometimes days after exposure. Even without a full allergy, fragrances and dyes are among the most common triggers for facial irritation and contact dermatitis.
What About Killing Bacteria on Your Face?
If you’re drawn to Dial because you want to fight acne-causing bacteria, the antibacterial approach is less effective than it sounds. Your face hosts a complex community of microorganisms, and most of them are either harmless or actively beneficial. Research on antibacterial soap use found that while these soaps do shift the types of bacteria living on skin, they don’t significantly reduce the overall diversity or number of organisms. The shifts in bacterial communities also persisted for at least two weeks after people stopped using the soap, meaning the disruption lingers.
More importantly, the amount of soap used predicted how much the bacterial community changed, following a dose-response pattern. Scrubbing your face aggressively with antibacterial soap doesn’t sterilize it. It just reshuffles which bacteria dominate, potentially giving opportunistic species room to thrive while displacing helpful ones. For acne specifically, targeted treatments with ingredients like benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid are far more effective than washing with an antibacterial body soap.
When Doctors Actually Recommend Dial
You may have heard that surgeons sometimes tell patients to wash with Dial before a procedure, which might make it seem like a medical-grade cleanser. This is true but misleading. The standard pre-surgical wash uses chlorhexidine, a hospital-grade antiseptic. Dial is only recommended as a backup option for patients who are allergic to chlorhexidine. And even in that context, surgical prep instructions from hospitals like Johns Hopkins specify washing from the jaw down, explicitly avoiding the face, eyes, ears, and nose.
So even in the one medical scenario where Dial gets a doctor’s endorsement, it’s not being recommended for facial use.
What to Use Instead
A gentle, fragrance-free facial cleanser with a pH close to your skin’s natural range (around 4.5 to 5.5) will clean your face without stripping it. Look for products labeled as syndet bars or gel/cream cleansers rather than traditional soap. These use milder surfactants that remove dirt and excess oil while leaving the skin’s protective barrier intact.
If your skin is oily or acne-prone, a cleanser containing salicylic acid (typically 0.5% to 2%) will do a better job targeting clogged pores than any antibacterial soap. For dry or sensitive skin, cream-based cleansers with ceramides or glycerin help maintain hydration while cleaning. In either case, you’ll get cleaner, healthier skin than Dial can offer, without the dryness, irritation, or barrier damage that comes with using a body soap on your face.