Beauty lovers all over the world have been raving about Korean and Japanese beauty products of late, and with good reason.
Case in point: Remember the great BB cream hype of 2012? It was old news to the Koreans, who’d regarded it as a miracle product for a good 30 years before we’d even heard of the term here in Australia.
Considered to be at the cutting edge of beauty and skincare research (and with a real emphasis on caring for skin), it’s little surprise that the knowledge of popular ingredients used in Asian beauty products can seem, well, confusing.
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Should you be putting snail secretion on your face? Is prune water good for your skin? And what on earth is syn-ake?
Illustrator Darien Chen feels our pain. Trawling through product information, websites and the subreddit Asian Beauty where people trade reviews and experiences of using products, he has compiled the ultimate cheat sheet to 18 common product ingredients. (Post continues after gallery.)
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“Unfortunately, because many of these ingredients have only recently become popular, a lot of them do not have readily available research studies in English,” Chen told Allure.
“The guide is meant to be a quick cheat sheet to give you a feel of what a product is supposed to do. While it’s not foolproof, the goal is to quickly inform people about which ingredients to keep an eye on when looking for help with a specific concern,” he says.
