LAGOM Gel To Water Cleanser

What is this product?

LAGOM's Gel To Water Cleanser is a 220ml morning wash for people who hate foam: a springy gel that thins to water, with three nonionic ester surfactants, no soap pair, no sulfate and no ethanol anywhere in its 20 ingredients, and humectants placed ahead of every extract. Fragrance is printed fourteenth, so skip it if you avoid fragrance, and it is not the one for heavy makeup, which LAGOM says itself by directing point makeup to a dedicated remover. Its two headline figures, 85 percent skincare ingredients and 99 percent pore-debris removal, come with no test method, and its patch test is quoted as non-irritating at 24 and 48 hours without a panel size or a date.

What makes it different?

The formulation is unusually coherent for a product making sensitivity claims, and the humectants sitting in the top six slots rather than decorating the tail is the tell. Against that sits a documentation problem LAGOM made itself: its single-product page and its set page print two different ingredient tables for the same cleanser, with the set version adding dimethicone, sodium ascorbyl phosphate, sodium hyaluronate, ethanol and eight aromatic oils. Whoever reads the label on the set page and whoever reads it on the product page are reading about different products.

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.

Key ingredientWorth a closer look

• Water
• Dipropylene Glycol
• PEG-6 Caprylic/Capric Glycerides
• Glycerin
• Polyglyceryl-4 Caprate
• Urea
• Polyglyceryl-6 Caprylate
• 1,2-Hexanediol
• Carbomer
• Tromethamine
• Hydroxyacetophenone
• Butylene Glycol
• Ethylhexylglycerin
• Fragrance
• Portulaca Oleracea Extract
• Disodium EDTA
• Saponaria Officinalis Leaf Extract
• Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein
• Maltodextrin
• Sapindus Mukorossi Fruit Extract

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

Did the ad claims hold up?

We checked 13 lines this product advertises against the ingredient list and public documents. 2 of them hold up. The rest are only partly right or have nothing behind them.

Claims translated from Korean, originals preserved.

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

Which articles cover it?

Articles on this site that write about this product.

• Fragrance-free, with sixteen essential oils on the listFragrance-free usually means one word is absent from the ingredient list. 60 of the 519 fragrance-free products we read still carry scented botanical oils.
• Free-from claims are the easiest thing on a label to checkA free-from badge is one of the few marketing lines the ingredient list underneath it can settle outright. Here are five it settles.