Review: Shiseido Aqualabel Whitening Jelly Essence

I am writing this while wearing a hydrogel mask with my newly purchased Daiso silicone mask cover! Mask + Daiso + glasses = me looking like an overly studious and botoxed serial killer. It is for this reason I have waited until the rest of my house has gone to bed before applying the slippery hydrogel onto the skin, so as to prevent any impulsive 911 (well, 191 here) calls should someone walk in to see me like dis. Anyway. It's been approximately one month since I started my relationship with the Shiseido Aqualabel Whitening Jelly Essence, so I can finally review it!

Apologies for the blurry photo! I only just noticed this after uploading.

The following information is paraphrased from the ever-informative, Ratzilla Cosme: The Shiseido Aqualable Whitening Jelly Essence is supposed to be a 4-in-1 product: an astringent, hydrating lotion, serum, and moisturizer. Its main function is to prevent dark spots. The main active in this is m-tranexamic acid. I became interested in this after this post on Reddit about actual pore minimizing ingredients. The poster mentioned this product as an affordable option for the ingredient, glycylglycine, and what do you know, I managed to find it in stores on sale a few weeks later! So I bought this for the pore minimizing abilities, but became pleasantly surprised at the overall results.

Review: The Saem Snail Soothing Gel

Having lurked assiduously on several skincare and beauty blogs and subreddits for almost two years (1 year and 7 months if you want to be exact), I've learned a lot about how to read ingredients list on a skincare items. This allows me to be more critical, and look past advertising claims (since everything seems like the new "it" and wonder product these days) in order to determine where best to invest my money. This is important, because whether I use the product or not, every skincare and beauty product I buy will be sunk cost anyway (unless I manage to sell/swap it, but that's hard given my location).

My improved knowledge of ingredients has given me more confidence to venture out beyond blogger favorites, and explore lesser known products. This leads me to today's review of The Saem Snail Soothing Gel.

Look at dem snails, ain't they so cute?