mixsoon Bean Essence

What is this product?

A seven-ingredient ferment essence, and the shortness of the panel is the product. Water, propanediol and glycerin occupy the first three positions and the remaining four entries are all fermented plant material: a soybean ferment extract, a pomegranate ferment extract, a barley-seed ferment filtrate and a pear-juice ferment filtrate. There is no oil, no ester, no emulsifier, no fatty alcohol, no fragrance, no alcohol and no conventional preservative, so the comedogenicity screen returns nothing because there is nothing to rate, while the fungal-acne screen fires on four of seven entries because ferments are the entire active content. The brand's own copy claims 단 4가지 전성분, which the statutory panel contradicts at seven. A Kurly listing claims AHA content, and no acid of any kind is declared. One concentration is published, 25,000 ppm of the soybean ferment, and only on an Olive Young gift-set record.

What makes it different?

The separator is subtractive and unusually extreme. An essence of this kind can carry a humectant system, a preservative, a chelator, a solubiliser, a gum and a fragrance on top of its water base; this one stops at seven entries and spends four of them on a single ingredient family. That makes it easy to reason about from either direction: a reader screening for fragrance, alcohol, oil, ester or emulsifier can clear it in one pass, and a reader who reacts to fermented ingredients can rule it out just as fast, because removing the ferments would leave nothing but water and two humectants. The second separator is a caution about how the product is described rather than about what is in it. Both of the exfoliation claims attached to this product are undeclared: the brand miscounts its own panel, and the retailer names an ingredient class that appears nowhere on it. Whatever 각질 effect users report, and they do report it as the highest-count review topic, is not traceable to a declared ingredient, and with no published pH there is no way to judge whether residual ferment acidity is doing the work.

What is in it?

The full ingredient list as the brand publishes it, in the printed order. Each name links to what we know about that ingredient.

This brand publishes its ingredient list in Korean only. Names below are the matching INCI names from the Korean Cosmetic Association ingredient dictionary, except 3 with no dictionary entry, left in Korean.

• Water
• Propanediol
• Glycerin
• Lactobacillus/Soybean Ferment Extract
• 락토바실러스/석류발효추출물
• 효모/보리씨발효여과물
• 락토바실러스/배즙발효여과물

Ingredients with no mark are ones we found nothing notable about, and when marks overlap on one ingredient we show the caution first.

We could not place these in the list above: 락토바실러스/콩발효추출물, 락토바실러스/석류발효추출물, 효모/보리씨발효여과물, 락토바실러스/배즙발효여과물

Did the ad claims hold up?

We checked 7 lines this product advertises against the ingredient list and public documents. One of them holds up. The rest are only partly right or have nothing behind them.

Each line is quoted as the brand published it, and each one was read on its own against the ingredient list and the documents the brand publishes.

How we read these lines