I cannot believe that I am just giving this product a full review. I have gone through so many bottles of this product that it is up there with my Hanskin Hyaluron Skin Essence. Pyunkang Yul, besides being a brand based on oriental medicine, has some absolutely amazing products. The Pyunkang Yul Essence Toner is one of my favorite toners that I have tried, so I’m finally going to share my thoughts with you all. Keep reading to find out the featured ingredients, the thoughts of myself and the Koreans, as well as where you can get this if you are interested yourself!
Things to know about the Pyunkang Yul Essence Toner:
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.
- Arginine – is a hydrating amino acid that comes from pumpkin seedlings and lupin. it helps build collagen in the skin and is also a natural antioxidant.
This product is formulated with the following ingredients that are “bad”* for your skin:
- Bis- PEG-18 Methyl Ether Dimethyl Silane – 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-100 Stearate itself, but due to contamination that can occur if low-quality materials are used. In this formula, it is most likely used as a stabilizer to allow the other ingredients to work well together. Additionally, any cosmetic grade PEGs go through a refinement process to remove as many impurities as possible.
K-Points: 10/10
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 have nothing bad to say about this toner. It is incredibly moisturizing, but not overly heavy at the same time. It soaks into the skin at the perfect rate, and I find it to be incredibly soothing. This essence is one of my constant re-buys, and I actually have 3 other bottles of it to work through because I go back to it so often. I even have one for travel for when I am able to do that again. It is by far one of my favorite toners.
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. On the app, this is probably the 5th product on the list in rank order. Everyone online is talking about how this product is so amazing for sensitive skin. It only has 5 ingredients, so it is excellent for if your skin is going through a bout of something.
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 have picked this product up from a variety of places over the years. In this particular instance, I think I picked it up from Style Korean. Something really exciting about this product though is that you can now pick it up on Walmart’s website! With Walmart, 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 are 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 essence is 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.
