After dozens of hours spent researching manuka honey’s beneficial skin care qualities, our top pick for the best manuka honey for face and skin care is Steens Raw Manuka Honey UMF 10+. It’s a raw honey and has a UMF 10+ rating, ensuring it has all the qualities that make it great for your skin while still being affordable.
Best Manuka Honey for Face and Skin Care
Steens Raw Manuka Honey UMF 10+ is our top face and skin care pick for most people. Steens extracts their honey using a cold pressed process which ensures the honey is only heated to 96F. This ensures the beneficial enzymes, antioxidants, and other nutrients in the honey aren’t denatured by high temperatures.
A UMF rating of 10+ also means the honey has natural antibacterial properties and acts as a cleanser, killing the bacteria on your face and living in your pores.
It’s common for most honey producers to heat their honey to temperatures over 150F when they extract the honey and during processing. This makes the honey easier to work with but has the effect of breaking down the antioxidants and enzymes in the honey, which help prevent free radicals from damaging your skin cells.
Our top pick is an especially good value when you consider that Steens manuka honey usually commands premium prices due to the care they take in minimally processing their honey. Steens Raw Manuka Honey UMF 10+ is consistently priced lower than other UMF 10+ manuk honey, so you’re getting a great quality honey at a competitive price.
Upgrade Pick
Tahi’s Raw Manuka Honey UMF 10+ is our pick for people interested in supporting an eco-friendly company. It’s a raw UMF 10+ manuka honey so it’s just as good for your skin but on top of that, Tahi has a fantastic track record when it comes to thinking past their bottom line:
- Carbon neutral company
- Supports reforestation of cleared farmland
- Engage in responsible harvesting
Tahi is serious about reducing their environmental impact and they actively measure and independently verify and manage their carbon footprint. As part of their efforts, they’ve achieved a carbon neutral status.
Tahi views nature as their biggest asset, from the bees that produce their honey to the natural ecosystems that their bees forage in. They engage in the reforestation of land that was previously cleared of native bush to be used as pasture land for cattle and sheep. This helps support biodiversity and rebuild the natural ecosystems that their bees and other native species thrive in.
They also engages in responsible harvesting. Tahi harvests only a portion of the honey that the bees produce, leaving the remainder of the honey to sustain the bees that produce it. Most honey produces harvest all their honey and sustain their bees on a mixture of sugar and water which deprives the bees of their nutrient-rich honey.
How does manuka honey benefit your skin?
Manuka honey has some special qualities that make it great for your skin:
- Antibacterial
- Anti-inflammatory
- Promotes healing
- Naturally hydrates skin
Antibacterial
Many kinds of honey can have antibacterial properties but manuka honey is especially good at getting rid of bacteria. A number of studies have demonstrated manuka honey’s unique ability to kill different kinds of bacteria, including ones that cause skin infections and the ones that live in your pores and cause acne.
Anti-Inflammatory
Honey has natural anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce redness and inflammation from dry, irritated skin as well as adult acne. Besides reducing the redness of inflamed skin, it also helps to soothe the skin and reduce discomfort from swelling.
Promotes Healing
Honey has a low pH level making it slightly acidic. While it may seem counterintuitive, the quality actually helps to promote cellular regeneration by helping cells absorb oxygen. Antioxidants in honey also help to prevent cellular damage from free radicals.
Naturally Hydrates Skin
Honey is acts as a natural humectant and can draw moisture in from the environment, helping to hydrate your skin.
How we chose the best manuka honey for face and skin care
Raw Honey
Our first criteria was to find honey that was raw and not processed at temperatures over 118F. Heating honey above these temperatures degrades the naturally occurring enzymes and antioxidants in manuka honey that are beneficial for skin care.
Raw honey also has naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide which can help kill bacteria living on your face. Like the enzymes in honey, hydrogen peroxide is also sensitive to heat and degrades quickly under high temperatures. Honey processed at temperatures above 118F have significantly lower levels of naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide.
UMF 10+ Rating
The second thing we considered was the UMF rating of the various manuka honeys we looked at. The UMF rating of the honey effectively measures the potency of manuka honey’s unique antibacterial activity. The higher the number, the more antibacterial it is.
At levels lower than UMF 10+, manuka honey doesn’t have antibacterial activity greater than regular honey. So, to benefit from manuka honey’s special bacteria-killing antibacterial quality we looked for a minimum rating of UMF 10+.
Higher grades above UMF 10+ don’t provide much additional benefit particularly considering the steep jump in price between different grades of manuka honey. It’s not unusual for UMF 15+ manuka honey to be close to double the price of UMF 10+ manuka honey from the same brand.
For most people using manuka honey for skin care, a UMF 10+ manuka honey is the best bet.
Price
Our final consideration was price. Manuka honey can be expensive, so besides just looking at our first two criteria, we also looked for manuka honey that offered great value.
