I know that I have talked quite a bit about Pyunkang Yul lately, but that is because I have been using a lot of Pyunkang Yul! If you want to just read about the Today, I wanted to talk about a product from the brand that is one of my skin savers in winter or when I have irritated skin. Keep reading to find out why I love the Pyunkang Yul Balancing Gel so much.
Things to know about Pyunkang Yul Balancing Gel:
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are good for your skin:
- Astragalus Membranaceus Root Extract – a known antioxidant that also has anti-inflammatory and anti-aging properties. This is the very first ingredient on the list, so it is the highest concentration.
- Jojoba Seed Oil – another known antioxidant with extensive moisturizing properties that can help soothe skin and help prevent breakouts
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are “bad”* for your skin:
- PEG-150 Distearate 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.
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.
Honestly, I am obsessed with this product. It is so good for repairing and strengthening a damaged skin barrier, as many of ours are in winter. Whenever I have irritated skin that is red, and maybe blotchy, I put this on before bed, and the next morning the redness is barely even there. The effectiveness of this product on my skin is truly impressive. The only downside to it is that it is incredibly sticky, so your face may stick to your pillow a little bit, which I consider to be an incredibly small price to pay for the peace of mind that is good skin.
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. From what I can see, a number of people did give this product incredibly positive reviews, but the main review that I did see was someone who did have a negative reaction to the product, and it caused blotches and puffiness on their face. It looks like an allergic reaction though, and I have incredibly sensitive skin and have no issues with it. Because of this, I think you should be safe to use this product despite the one negative review. Skincare is incredibly individual, so even though one person has a terrible reaction, it may work great for you.
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 did pick this up on Style Korean, but I also pick up many of my K-Beauty products on Sephora or Ulta. There, 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!
What products have you tried that are amazing, 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.
