I promise you that I am most of the way through posting about most of the Pyunkang Yul. The Pyunkang Yul Moisture Ampoule, although I have been testing it for quite some time, I was holding off on posting my thoughts. The reason is that I needed more time to gather my thoughts on this product.
Things to know about the Pyunkang Yul Moisture Ampoule:
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are good for your skin:
- Coptis Japonica Extract also known as Japanese Goldthread extract is known to help decrease inflammation. It is also known to be a good antimicrobial and antioxidant. Also, there is ongoing research that this product could help with cellulite.
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are “bad”* for your skin:
- PEG-150 Disterate isn’t an ingredient that is truly bad for your skin. PEG is simply an abbreviation of Polyethylene Glycol, and the 150 after it refers to the molecular weight of the PEG. Any product in the PEG line there is the potential to be carcinogenic, especially when used in higher concentrations. This isn’t because of the PEG-150 Distearate itself, but due to contamination that can occur if low-quality materials are used. Before being used in skincare, these ingredients go through a refinement process.
Who is this product good for?
- Those with incredibly dry skin
- Those with incredibly sensitive skin, as this product only has 6 ingredients
- Those that need a good, strong evening moisturizer
K-Points: 7/10
So, for beauty reviews, unlike my album unboxings, I will be much harsher on because this can directly impact your health, where buying K-Pop albums does not. It just impacts your wallet. As such, all of my beauty reviews will be out of 10 points. I will not be going over that number.
So, overall, I do enjoy this formula. It is incredibly simple, and I know if my skin gets irritated while testing out other products, this is a safe product for me to return to to help calm it down. Quite frankly, that is what I use this product for most of the time.
Although they call this product an ampoule, I find it incredibly thick, and it doesn’t absorb into the skin very quickly. It provides a nice, thick layer over the skin to help establish a barrier. With the simple formulation, it is truly perfect for the evening and for those who really need to protect their skin. I would put this product in a similar class to the Pyunkang Yul Balancing Gel when talking about the texture.
What are the Koreans saying?
I was digging through reviews on 화해**, a Korean skincare app that lists out the ingredients of products from many brands for people to look through as well as post reviews. For those with sensitive, acne-prone skin, this product seems to be quite effective. They love the fact that there isn’t a scent at all to the product as well. Many Koreans report having sensitive skin (about 58.6% from a study***), so seeing high reviews from them is a good thing. Overall, they say that this formula is moisturizing while preventing their skin sensitivity from getting worse.
Where Can I Buy It?
Whenever I buy K-Beauty, I do shop at a couple of different places. If you want to see all of the places that I shop at, you can check them all out here. If I am picking up Pyunkang Yul specifically, I will always pick it up on Style Korean. Style Korean is a website that carries at least 100 K-Beauty brands and offers free worldwide shipping. Although Style Korean isn’t specifically a part of this program, a number of the other sites in the list can use Rakuten for cash back off of your purchases on their site.
What is Rakuten?
Rakuten is a cashback site that gives you money for purchases you may have already made. They even have an extension for multiple browsers so when you go to a website that uses Rakuten, it will automatically pop up the cashback button to make sure you are saving money. I use this all the time, and I got over $80 back from them for purchases I was going to make anyway. That’s about 3 more albums I can buy!
If you’ve never used Rakuten before, you can use this link to get $10 when making a qualified purchase of $25 when using Rakuten. You will also get whatever percent cashback is being offered from the site you are purchasing from. Sephora, typically has 4% cashback, through here. Ulta typically has 3%. These are just some of the companies on the website, but there are other major retailers on there as well!
Rakuten also has a Google Chrome extension that will tell you as soon as you log onto a site that has cashback with a little pop-up in the corner so that you can ensure you are saving money!
QUESTION, K-Nuggets? Let me know in the comments down below!
사랑합니다!
–Rachel
*I put bad in quotes here because everything is subjective. Just because an ingredient that may have some amount of research on it that it can cause issues in the skin exists in a product says nothing about how it is processed and refined when making the product. It also says nothing about where that particular ingredient came from and the quality of that ingredient. It’s just like with cooking you can have all the same ingredients to start, but depending on what you do with those ingredients, you can get two completely different end products. Liah Yoo, Youtuber and now the owner of the brand Krave Beauty, made an excellent video talking about this. You can watch that here.
**Note: 화해 still only exists in Korean, but some of the products can be searched for in English.
*** For reference: Kim YR, Cheon HI, Misery L, Taieb C, Lee YW. Sensitive skin in Korean population: An epidemiological approach. Skin Res Technol. 2018 May;24(2):229-234. doi: 10.1111/srt.12418. Epub 2017 Oct 25. PMID: 29067709. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29067709/
