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KOREAN PHARMACY

A Korean routine for firmness and elasticity

Read enough Korean ingredient lists and one entry starts appearing everywhere: adenosine. That is not a sourcing accident. Adenosine is one of the actives Korea's MFDS recognises for its anti-wrinkle functional-cosmetic designation, so a Korean brand that wants the designation formulates it in at the notified level and declares it. It is a signature of a Korean-market formula, and it is thin on the US-reformulated shelf.

So adenosine carries full weight here, alongside the peptides, PDRN and the retinoids. The engine also does something the category does not: when the treatment step it picks declares a retinoid or an exfoliating acid, the routine says so, places that step at night only, and tells you why. A retinal at position 12 is a real instruction about when to use the bottle, and it is derivable from the label rather than from marketing copy.

Method reviewed by Nurcan SaglamLicensed dermo-cosmetic expert, Paris. Director of NN Academy de Paris.

Built for skin that sits comfortably through the day. Ranked against 3,295 published ingredient lists across 5,052 products you can buy today. Reset to the standard version

The routine

  1. 1Morning and night

    Cleanse

    Everything after this lands on bare skin, so this is the step that decides what the rest of the routine is working with.

    ThenGo straight on to the next step while skin is still damp. A humectant layer applied to a damp face has water to hold on to.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

  2. 2Morning and night

    Prep

    The watery layer. It rehydrates after cleansing and thins the ground so the treatment step spreads instead of sitting.

    ThenAbout thirty seconds. Long enough to stop sliding, short enough that the skin is still damp underneath.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

  3. 3Morning and night

    Treat

    The step chosen for the answer you gave. This is where the actives are, and it is the one product in the routine worth reading the whole list of.

    ThenA full minute. This layer is the one that most rewards being left alone before it is covered.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

  4. 4Evening only

    Seal

    The lid. Without it the water the first three steps brought in leaves again, which is the mechanism behind skin that feels wonderful at 8am and tight at 2pm.

    ThenA minute or two in the morning before the last step goes on.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

  5. 5Morning only

    Morning finish

    The last thing on in the morning, over everything else, never mixed into the step before it.

    ThenLet it set before anything touches it.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

  6. 6Evening only

    Twice a week

    Not a daily step. It goes in after cleansing, in place of the prep layer, on the two evenings a week you use it.

    ThenFollow it with the seal step the same evening. Skip the treat step on the nights you use this one.

    Swap it: 4 other products that clear the same filters

Not quite you?

Change an answer and the whole thing re-ranks. The result keeps its own URL.

Change the answers
1What is your skin doing?
2How does it feel by two in the afternoon?

A better question than skin type, because it is answerable by looking. It is also the one that decides gel against cream.

3What can your skin not have?

Optional, and the reason this works. Rule something out and we only offer products whose own declared ingredient list names none of it.

Reading the reasoning

Each step says which entries it matched and where they sit on that product’s own declared list. “Panthenol 4th of 34” means panthenol is the fourth of thirty-four ingredients, and because an ingredient list runs from the highest concentration down to one percent, fourth of thirty-four is a formulation decision and thirty-first of thirty-four usually is not.

The positions are the whole argument, and they are checkable. Open any product on this page and the full list is printed there, unabridged and not as an image, which is the one field where this store beats every competitor in the category. If a position here disagrees with the list there, the list there is right and we have a bug worth telling us about.

One rule overrules the ranking, and it is the only one. A routine may carry at most one exfoliating acid or retinoid step, and the treatment step is the one that gets it, because the treatment step is what the actives step is. A toner is a hydrating layer and a moisturiser is a lid; neither is where a second acid belongs, whatever it ranks. Left to the ranking alone this page once offered a glycolic toner, an AHA-BHA serum and a lactic acid pad in the same routine, each of them the best-scoring product in its own step and the three of them together a barrier injury. Whichever step ends up carrying the acid says so, and prints the entry on its list that put it there.

What we will not do is tell you a product will fix something. A position on a list is a fact; an outcome is a promise about your skin that nobody who has not seen it can make. Every step has four alternatives behind it for exactly that reason, and the acid rule does not hide them: if you want the acid toner anyway, it is in the swap list under the step, one click from being yours.