Yeah, alcohol-based toner is meant to act as an astringent to close up your pores. If you use a creamy cleanser, a toner is good to get rid of any remnants of the cleanser that remain on the skin. If you're using a facewash, though, you probably don't need a toner because the water should be enough to rinse away the facewash.

Not all toners contain alcohol. Sometimes, if I've cleansed with cold cream, I use a Kiehl's toner which is alcohol-free and contains calendula. It's very gentle.

The only product recommended for me in that survey which I might actually buy is the exfoliating wipes. I had no idea such a thing existed and I sometimes get flaky skin on my forehead.

So pores are like the little indentations you can see on e.g. your nose if you look real close? are they supposed to be less visible/closed? I guess they need to be open to some degree and closed to some degree... this is complex stuff

There's nothing you can do to make your pores look smaller. They're meant to be visible on your nose. In magazines pores are airbrushed out, so people think they should have this smooth, pore-free, almost plasiticised skin, which nobody has at all. In fact, many models have bad skin due to all the makeup they have to wear.

But I would recommend the Biore pore-cleansing strips if you have any blackheads on your nose (which is very common). Blackheads are formed when sebum - the 'grease' in your skin - is exposed to oxygen and turns black. It forms a little plug in the pore. The nose-cleansing strips adhere to the blackheads and pull them out without the need to squeeze.

It's funny, I just google image'd "pores" and saw a close-up of Cameron Diaz's face as the first result and realized something. In leather, seeing these "pores" (grains) is supposed to be a mark of quality over smoothed-out or as you said, plastic-looking leather.

I feel like using toner is kind of "out"; a gentle face-wash and a moisturizer is all most people need.

Some people have blackheads on their noses. Most of us who think we have a lot of blackheads have what are called "sebaceous filaments": filled pores that are all about the same size and just a bit darker than your skin, versus genuine blackheads, which are larger, more swollen, and darker.

My dermatologist warned me against Bioré strips because the adhesive can annoy sensitive skin, and even if you don't have sensitive skin, you have to keep applying the strips because the pores just fill up again.

But BHA (salicylic acid) can clean out filled pores and make them look significantly smaller. I tried some BHA liquid a couple of weeks ago and got amazing results within a couple of days.

So if you have regular person pores with very tiny sebaceous filaments, no, you can't make them invisible. But if you have larger sebaceous filaments / filled pores, you can get much closer to regular person pores with BHA.

I use toner about once a week. It seems to prevent blackheads for me.