SHIONLE Laminaria Ampoule Cleansing Foam

What is this product?

SHIONLE's Laminaria Ampoule Cleansing Foam is a 120ml potassium-soap wash: good for oily, sebum-heavy skin that tolerates an alkaline cleanser, wrong for dry, barrier-impaired, fragrance-avoiding or reactive skin, which should take a low-pH cleanser instead. Its kelp is disclosed twice and unusually precisely, juice at 10 percent in position 3 of 35 and powder at 1 percent in position 12, which also tells you everything past position 12 sits at or under roughly 1 percent, including the salicylic acid at 20, the declared fragrance at 18 and all eight hyaluronates; the brand publishes no pH.

What makes it different?

Two disclosed kelp amounts on one label, 10 percent juice at position 3 and 1 percent powder at position 12, hand you a usable 1 percent ceiling for the whole back two thirds of the list, which is more than most cleansers let you work out. The other oddity is an eight-species hyaluronate tail on a wash you rinse straight off, of which exactly one, hydroxypropyltrimonium hyaluronate, is cationic and actually deposits, joined by polyquaternium-7, a cationic conditioning polymer that is not a hyaluronate at all; those two together are why it feels slippery after rinsing.

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
• Glycerin
• Saccharina Japonica Juice
• Myristic Acid
• Palmitic Acid
• Stearic Acid
• Lauric Acid
• Potassium Hydroxide
• Sorbitol
• Cocamidopropyl Betaine
• Glyceryl Stearate
• Laminaria Japonica Powder
• Synthetic Beeswax
• Sorbitan Olivate
• 1,2-Hexanediol
• Sodium Polyacrylate
• Sodium Chloride
• Fragrance
• Polyquaternium-7
• Salicylic Acid
• Arachidic Acid
• Disodium EDTA
• Sodium Benzoate
• Succinic Acid
• Butylene Glycol
• Salix Nigra (Willow) Bark Extract
• Sodium Hyaluronate
• Charcoal Extract
• Hydroxypropyltrimonium Hyaluronate
• Hydrolyzed Hyaluronic Acid
• Sodium Acetylated Hyaluronate
• Hyaluronic Acid
• Hydrolyzed Sodium Hyaluronate
• Sodium Hyaluronate Crosspolymer
• Potassium Hyaluronate

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: Myristic Acid, Palmitic Acid, Stearic Acid, Lauric Acid, Arachidic Acid, Glyceryl Stearate, Sorbitan Olivate, Salicylic Acid

Did the ad claims hold up?

We checked 6 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.

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

What else is worth seeing?

Products we read alongside this one.

• beplain Mung Bean Weakly Acidic Cleansing FoamAnother product in the same category

Which articles cover it?

Articles on this site that write about this product.

• Adsorb, magnet, absorbing bubbles: what a cleanser actually doesFour cleansers explain themselves with words borrowed from physics. The cleaning is real. The mechanism printed on the page is usually the wrong one.
• Weakly acidic cleansers: how to tell when the label earned itOnly one of these five Korean cleansers publishes an actual pH range. The ingredient list tells you the rest, and one of them is a soap in disguise.