As a dry-skinned girl, I am always looking for a good, moisturizing product. If I don’t moisturize my skin thoroughly, I always feel tight, and my skin starts to get flaky. I heard good things about the Isntree Hyaluronic Acid Toner, and I knew I needed to try it for my skin! Keep reading to find out the key ingredients in the formula, my thoughts, as well as the Koreans’, and where you can find this product yourself.
Things to know about Isntree Hyaluronic Acid Toner:
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are good for your skin:
- Hyaluronic Acid (In 3 different forms) is a moisturizing superstar, that holds 1000 times its weight in water. In comparison to hyaluronic acid, it is much smaller, and can penetrate into deeper layers of the skin, providing more moisture than its acidic counterpart. This ingredient is well researched and it’s benefits, including how it can prevent aging of the skin.
- Glycerin is an ingredient in many skincare formulas hydrates the skin by attracting other water particles to the deeper layers of the skin.
- Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract (Aloe Vera) is a well known hydrating and calming ingredient for the skin. It is commonly used to treat burns (including sunburns). Since this formula doesn’t have any alcohols in it, it can provide excellent moisturizing effects as well. Alcohols in a formula can negate the hydration.
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are “bad”* for your skin:
- There is nothing inherently bad for your skin in this product. That being said, when using hyaluronic acid products, this ingredient can make ingredients in other formulas more potent, causing you to react negatively to things you would normally be fine with. Also, you can experience irritation if you do not use an occlusive product with this, you may experience irritation. Hyaluronic Acid in its various forms draws moisture to the skin, but if there is nothing for it to grab, it can cause irritation.
Who is this product good for?
- Those with dry skin
- Those with dehydrated skin
- Those with irritated skin
K-Points: 9/10
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.
I honestly really enjoyed the experience of using this product. In regards to texture, it is very similar to the Pyunkang Yul Essence Toner, which is one of my favorite products of all time. It’s incredibly moisturizing and calming. Regardless of that though, and this is the reason that I took a point off since it was so similar in texture, but my skin wasn’t as in love with it. I did get a bit of irritation from this, but as mentioned above, that was definitely due to what i was using it with. As such, my Pyunkang Yul Essence Toner is still my number 1.
What are the Koreans saying?
I was digging through reviews on 화해(Hwahae)**, a Korean skincare app that lists out the ingredients of products from many brands for people to look through as well as post reviews. On Hwahae, this product has 4.11 out of 5 stars across 11,528 reviews. All of the reviews talked about how hydrating and gentle the product is. They also noted how perfect this product is for those with dry skin. They also noted that this product is amazing for making an impromptu face mask with cotton squares! One reviewer did mention that shortly after using this product, they did get a little bit of purging of their skin. My guess is this was because of something else in their routine that the hyaluronic acid increased the potency of.
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. I believe I got this in a subscription box, but you can get Isntree products on Sokoglam. With Sokoglam, you can also 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!
Which moisturizing toners are your favorite, 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.
