Review: Suki Concentrated Balancing Toner

Initially, I wanted to purchase the Suki Bio-active Purifying Face Serum (a serum for oily, congested skin) but at US$82.95 for 15ml, it was wayyyy too expensive. The second ingredient in the Suki Bio-active Purifying Face Serum was white willow bark extract (salicylic acid), so I decided to look for something else that has a high concentration of natural salicylic acid, to unclog my pores. White willow bark extract (salicylic acid) is the 4th on the list for Suki Concentrated Balancing Toner, and it was more affordable at US$32.95 for 120ml, so I decided to give it a try. 

It comes in a heavy glass spray bottle - the spray pump dispenses just the right amount of mist, very nicely done. The toner has a light, refreshing citrus-floral scent and it feels very soothing on my skin. It provides a calming and healing base for oily, acne-prone skin before moisturizer is applied. This definitely helped in making my skin less inflamed. 

How I use it - I go over my face with Simple toner on a cotton pad, then I follow up with a spritz of Suki Concentrated Balancing Toner all over. Then I apply tea tree oil to my break-out-prone areas and finish with facial oil.

The only con is that the glass bottle is very travel-unfriendly. I didn't pack this along with me to Hong Kong and I broke out a little bit then. 

Ingredients: rosa damascena flower distillate, lavender distillate (alcohol), lavandula angustifolia (lavender) oil, salix alba (white willow salicins) bark extract, anthemis nobilis flower oil, aloe barbadensis leaf, phospholipids (vitamin c), melaleuca alternifolia (tea tree) leaf oil, ascophyllum nodosum extract, calendula officinalis flower extract, matricaria recutita (chamomilla) flower extract, rosa canina fruit extract, mentha piperita (peppermint) oil, magnesium ascorbyl phosphate, *aroma/fragrance, citral, linalool

Review: YÜLI Skincare Cell Perfecto PM, M.E. Skin Fuel and Halcyon Cleanser

I got to know YÜLI Skincare through Edo Jao's Twitter and Neiman's Idealist. At the time my skin was terrible - even after I had been in my current less stressful job for almost a year, using SKII and my old fallback (DRX Blemish Formula and Comedone Formula, which I will review another day), my skin was still clogged, dry and painful with acne. After reading so many glowing reviews about YÜLI Skincare, I had to give it a try. Their products are pretty pricey but they had a Black Friday promotion, giving out a complimentary Cellular Lip Conditioner with each purchase, so I decided to bite the bullet and bought full sizes of Halcyon Cleanser, Cell Perfecto PM and M.E. Skin Fuel. Shipping to Singapore was US$25 and thankfully the glass bottles arrived safe and sound!

YÜLI's full-sized products are packaged in glass bottles (MIRON violet?) - not very travel friendly, but I brought my entire stash with me to my recent Hong Kong work trip by bundling it in between my clothes. The glass dark and almost opaque so I can't really tell how much product I have left unless I hold it into very strong light. But this leaves me feeling assured that the product is protected from light. 

Cell Perfecto PM - US$98 for 30ml

I use 4 drops of this every night - it's an amber-coloured oil with little flecks of sediment. You have to shake the bottle before every use (remember to empty the dropper first) to ensure that the sediment is evenly dispersed and picked up by your dropper. 

It makes my skin really smooth the next day and after a month of use, I notice that it faded the stubborn red acne marks on my face. They're not totally gone, but some scars and most of the redness on my forehead is gone. My cheeks still have red acne marks but they are gradually getting lighter. The results did not appear overnight, but I had a bad cold the last weekend so my nose was rubbed raw and all the skin was flaking off and so painful. I applied Cell Perfecto PM there and the next morning my skin was less raw and tender. 

Ingredients: Bioregenerating Botanical Infusion (Botanical Glycosides, Sea Minerals Complex), S. chinensis (Jojoba) oil*, M. integrifolia (Macadamia) oil*, O. ficus-indica (Indian Fig) seed oil*, C. inophyllum (Tamanu) oil*, H. rhamnoides (Sea Buckthorn) oil*, A. uva-ursi (Bearberry) extract*, H. italicum (Helichrysum)* extract, G. glabra (Liquorice) extract*, C. asiatica (Gotu Kola) extract*, Renew Minerals Complex (Methysulfonylmethane (MSM)* Derived from Pine Lignin, Phytosterols derived from Flax), A. linearis (Rooibos) extract*, B. carterii (Frankincense) extract*, D. carota (Carrot) seed extract^^, G. lucidum (Reishi) extract*, L-arginine, L-ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), L-Gluconic Acid (Derived from Kombucha Tea Ferment)

M.E. Skin Fuel - US$92 for 30ml

I use 4 drops of this every morning - it's a light, fluid oil. When I first started using it, it made my face look oily during the day. But after 2 weeks in Hong Kong (dry winter) and after 1 month total of using it regularly, my skin seems to have balanced out and is less oily. I'm pretty sure that the regular usage of YÜLI oils balanced out my skin so that it stopped producing so much oil. My skin is still oily but using M.E. Skin Fuel alone is very manageable now even in hot weather (of course I still use loose powder over it to mattify). 

After regular usage of M.E. Skin Fuel and Cell Perfecto PM, I find my skin less prone to inflammation. Even if I do get some zits (after a flight - cabin air wreaks havoc on my skin), they are not as painful and do not become too inflamed. 

Ingredients: S. chinensis (Jojoba) oil*, A. spinosa (Argan) oil*, P. armeniaca (Apricot Kernel) oil*, N. Sativa (Black Cumin) oil*, P. granatum (Pomegranate) oil*, R. idaeus (Red Raspberry) seed oil*, B. oleracea (Broccoli) seed oil*, O. ficus-indica (Indian Fig) seed oil*, H. rhamnoides (Sea Buckthorn) oil*, T. officinale (Dandelion) infused in jojoba oil*, Supercritical extracts of H. rhamnoides (Sea Buckthorn) seed and fruit*, H. italicum (Helichrysum)* extract, N. Caerulea (Blue Lotus) extract^^, J. grandiflorum (Jasmine) extract* 

Halcyon Cleanser - US$52 for 100ml

I use 3 full pumps of this when I wash my face, sometimes a little more if I'm cleaning my face at the end of the day and it's especially oily/dirty. It's a silky, fluid gel emulsion that has an herbal scent (reminds me a little of Chinese herbs? A little bitter) and it's extremely low-foaming,which takes some time getting used to. I've read some reviews that said it can remove the most stubborn mascara, but it's so expensive that I'm not going to use it as a make-up remover, you know? I do double cleansing - remove make-up first, then cleanse with Halcyon. I leave it on my face for a minute to let the beneficial ingredients do some work. It is definitely worth a try, it really soothes and calms inflamed skin. 

Ingredients: H. italicum/L. angustifolia hydrosol blend*, herbal infusion of (T.pratense*, C. sinensis*, S. media, Z. officinale*, O. fragans), D-aloe barbadensis,vegetable glycerine, sodium cocoyl isethionate (vegetable source), peptides derived from Amaranth protein, jojoba ester*, Rhodophyta (Red Algae) ferment, G.lucidum (Reishi) tincture*, zeolite, tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E), vitamin C ester, biodynamic fruit enzymes, petitgrain sur fleurs oil*, bergamot (bergaptene-free) oil*, collidal silver

-----

To make this a more objective review, something that a discerning skincare junkie would nitpick about would be that there was no expiry date printed on the packaging. (Understand that this is not a US FDA requirement, but I would like to know the exact date of manufacture or date of expiry, to be assured that I'm getting a fresh product. YÜLI's packaging does show shelf life, i.e. how many months the product can last after being opened, but this is not very useful if you don't know the date of manufacture or date of expiry. This applies to many other green skincare companies, such as 100% Pure.)

Also, this is the most low-foaming gel cleanser that I have ever used - the bubbles are tiny, see the photo below! (It was already disappearing when I took the photo, hard to capture!) With regular gel cleansers, I would put cleanser on my palm, followed by a little water and foam it on my hand before applying the foam on my face. However, with Halcyon, you have to wet your face, put Halcyon on your hands, apply Halcyon straight onto your wet face and lather it on your face. I take some time to really massage it it gently all around my face, then I leave it on for about 10 seconds and rinse off. My skin is super smooth after.

After a month of using YÜLI, I feel a change in my skin - it's smoother and less prone to inflammation. Even if zits appear, they don't erupt into something huge and nasty - they stay small and don't grow into a huge cyst. It definitely took some time - but after a month, the effects are starting to show! I will continue using YÜLI and update with any improvements. 

I am gradually trying to change my skincare to incorporate all-natural products. I think my skin started breaking out because I was experimenting with too many new products at the same time. Hopefully my skin will repair, renew and become as nice as it was 2 years ago. :)

2014 Skincare Regime

I'm back! Been away from blogging for months as I was busy juggling work and personal activities (I started cooking every weekend, it's fun but exhausting). 

Anyway, I'm back because I wanted to record my new skincare regime which I've been following for a month now. Prior to that, my skin was a mess - cystic acne sometimes and many clogged pores. I tried taking 25 mg of zinc gluconate daily, but it just made me feel very tired and it actually delayed my period. I guess zinc doesn't work for everyone. 

A few months back, I started reading Neiman's Idealist and No More Dirty Looks, which focus on clean/green skincare. So during last year's Black Friday sales, I bought a whole bunch of new skincare (which I researched very carefully beforehand). Here are my regimes - I tried it out in Singapore (hot and humid summer weather) and Hong Kong (winter - cold and dry). 

Summer
Cleanser: YÜLI Halcyon
Toner: Simple Soothing Facial Toner (applied with a cotton pad to eliminate any remaining residue)
Mist: SukiFace Concentrated Balancing Toner (provides a base of salicylic acid to declog my skin)
Treatment: Now Organic Essential Tea Tree Oil (I do a mixture of 2 drops essential oil to 8 drops of Simple toner, and apply it to areas of breakouts on my face)
Serum: YÜLI M.E. Skin Fuel (for day), YÜLI Cell Perfecto PM (for night)

Winter - Day
Cleanser: Physiogel Cleanser
Toner: Simple Soothing Facial Toner (applied with a cotton pad to eliminate any remaining residue)
Treatment: Now Organic Essential Tea Tree Oil (I do a mixture of 2 drops essential oil to 8 drops of Simple toner, and apply it to areas of breakouts on my face)
Serum: YÜLI M.E. Skin Fuel

Moisturizer: SukiFace Balancing Day Lotion OR DrGL Restore Gel Mask (thin layer)

Winter - Night
Cleanser: YÜLI Halcyon
Toner: Simple Soothing Facial Toner (applied with a cotton pad to eliminate any remaining residue)
Treatment: Now Organic Essential Tea Tree Oil (I do a mixture of 2 drops essential oil to 8 drops of Simple toner, and apply it to areas of breakouts on my face)
Serum: YÜLI Cell Perfecto PM (for night)

Moisturizer: DrGL Restore Gel Mask

My skin's oil production has really become more normalized after this regime and I don't get cystic acne now. Over the next few months I will update this post with links to the detailed review of these products! 

Review: Hadasui Toner

Do these look like bottles of mineral water? They're bottles of Hadasui, a skin-refreshing toner/lotion by Shiseido. There are 4 types:

Blue - for oily skin

Pink - moist, for dry skin

Green - minty with menthol, for men

White - "Suppliment-in" with 14 ingredients, collagen and amino acids. Jelly-type liquid.

They're available in smaller spray bottles but I bought these 400ml bottles because they're more value-for-money. I bought these in Beijing, but you can easily find them online. They are multi-purpose lotions that can be used as facial toners, just to refresh your body, or as an after-sun cooling lotion. 

Ingredients (from Kenko.com):

Hadasui Blue: Water, DPG, Rosemary extract, Sodium citrate, Sodium metaphosphate, Citric Acid, BG, Phenoxyethanol, Paraben

Hadasui Pink: Water, Bg, DPg, PEg-30, Glycerin, Raspberry extract, PEG-60 hydrogenated castor oil, Trioctanoin, Polyglyceryl diisostearate-2, Sodium citrate, Citric Acid, Sodium metaphosphate, Phenoxyethanol, Paraben

As a facial toner, with my oily but dehydrated skin, I much prefer the blue Hadasui, because it's lighter in texture. It's a nice, no-frills, basic toner. The pink one, despite its "moisture", is also surprisingly light, but I still prefer the blue, because the pink leaves a film on my skin. When applied with a cotton pad, they're both really good at removing traces of cleanser or dead skin cells. They're quite economical too - a 400ml bottle cost about S$12, which lasts me a little more than 2 months. 

Rating:

Hadasui Blue: 9/10 

Hadasui Pink: 7/10

Review: Dove Cleansing Oil Foam

This is the latest make-up remover I'm almost finished with - Dove Cleansing Oil Foam. I can't remember how much it cost, but I used it up pretty quickly. I use 3 pumps daily to get rid of sunscreen and foundation, and after 5 weeks, I've got half an inch left in the bottle. 

This is a little bit of foam - the foam is really lovely and luxurious and smells really nice (like Dove facial wash - which I used once upon a time and I think is discontinued). I use dry hands to work it into my dry skin and it removes my sunscreen and foundation well, but not waterproof mascara. I have to take care around the eye area, or my eyes get itchy. (At least it doesn't sting my eyes painfully!) Apparently it works with wet hands/wet face too, but I prefer dry. I like this oil cleansing foam for the convenience, but I find it a little drying. I do follow up with regular cleanser after removing my make-up with this. 

Ingredients: Potassium cocoyl glycinate, lauryl hydroxysultaine, lauryl glucoside, ethanol, sodium carbonate, peg-20 glyceryl triisostearate, butylene glycol laurate, glycerin, isopentyldiol, peg-8, hydrogenated polyisobutene, tocopherol, methylchloroisothiazolinone, methylisothiazolinone, magnesium nitrate, magnesium chloride, methylparaben, bht, disodium edta, perfume, water

I don't think I will repurchase - I bought it just to try, but I still prefer micellar waters! It's a pretty convenient and basic make-up remover though. 

Rating: 7/10

Review: Eucerin Aquaporin Active Light Moisturizing Cream

I've been using this Eucerin Aquaporin Active Light Moisturizing Cream lately, mainly as my night moisturizer. I love the packaging, it's flat and compact, easy to pack for travelling. 

It's a light-textured, totally non-greasy cream with a slight rosewater scent. It is very moisturizing - in fact, a little too moisturizing for use in humid Singapore. I think it would be good for oily skin-types in winter. (There's a regular version for dry/normal skin, while this is the light version.) I like using it when I'm in air-conditioning - when I wash my face at the end of the day, my face still feels very soft and moisturized! However, I would not use this on a day when I'm outdoors - it feels just a wee bit too heavy in Singapore's hot and moisture-laden climate. 

Ingredients:

Would I repurchase? I would probably get a tube if I was going overseas to a cold climate and needed more moisture. 

Rating: 9/10 

Q3-2013 Rambling

It's been a while! A lot of things have been happening in my life during the almost-2 months I was missing from the blogging world - I started doing yoga, pilates and ballet lessons in July for about 4 hours each week, which left me wiped out and exhausted (in a good way)! I have 2 hours of class on Wednesdays which leaves me pumped with adrenaline, so I can't really get to sleep till 1am in the morning, which makes me so tired the next day at work. 

My weekends have also been packed with stuff and I had 2 holidays - in August, I went to Kuala Lumpur with my friends and this week, I just came back from a staycation at Sentosa. So I really haven't had time to blog much, but I will be starting again soon because I have such a backload of stuff to review!

Just this week, I repurchased a couple of items from a skin doctor I went to years ago - his products really healed my skin. I haven't used the products for many years, because my skin was fantastic and awesome. What made me go back and buy them again, was because my skin right now isn't healing. My skin started getting really badly clogged in the second quarter of 2012, and I thought that it was due to stress and late nights from work. (I used to work really crazy hours - think 3am, plus weekends.) So, I expected my skin to get better after I switched jobs at the end of 2012. However, it's been over 8 months at a less stressful job (well, excluding the stress from learning my new job!) and my skin is still not as smooth and clear as it was before. So I'm hoping that starting on the products again will heal my skin. I will update on my progress, cross my fingers!

Anyway, here are some photos of the Gardens by the Bay which I went to recently - 

I went to Gardens by the Bay - Cloud Forest and Flower Dome. This is the Cloud Forest, during a watering session, where the mist is sprayed out to water the plants. Really pretty. 

This is at Flower Dome. I like how the leaves look so faded and pastel - they make it seem like I adjusted the colours but this is how it looks like in real life!

I know a lot of people like showy, big blooms, but I like tiny, dainty ones - they're so detailed and perfect and would make really good doll-sized bouquets!

Oh, these are pictures taken at the RWS SEA Aquarium. Pretty jellyfish!

Ok, enough pictures. You know... honestly, I always take a lot of photos but I'm way too lazy to put them online. I don't even update my Facebook. I'm always in awe of people who blog daily or update their Facebook pages even on vacation! Not for me.

Sometimes, for me, blogging is something that I need to tick off my to-do list. Previously, I would blog 1 post every weekend. (You can probably tell from the date of my posts.) But such structured posting goes against my spontaneous nature. Sometimes I'm just so tired on weekends from going out and just living! So I had to rethink - what's the purpose of this blog?

I turned this blog into a beauty blog because I was buying way too many products and I have a really bad memory, so I needed to review the products so that I could remember which were the duds and which were the amazing ones worth repurchasing. Along the way I got lost and started posting lots of my own travel/going out photos as well, which is fine, but I really hate uploading photos because it takes so much time. Now I realise, I'm fine with not Facebooking and letting the world know what I'm doing. That's because I'm too busy living my life!

Basically I decided, it's ok to not upload every single photo of my travels. Nobody needs to know the entire itinerary of my vacations. (Right?)

I'll stick with blogging about the things I love, which includes product reviews, decluttering and organizing, and maybe some style posts. And hell yeah, I love travelling and going out, but since I detest uploading my photos, I'll probably skim by those. :D Maybe one day I should do a huge post on photo organization (when I get down to it). Just maybe.

Till next time! :)