Baking powder is on the front of the tube in letters larger than the brand name. On the back, sodium bicarbonate is the eighteenth ingredient of twenty-one, sandwiched between sodium chloride and disodium EDTA at the level where preservatives live. The washing is done by something else entirely, and that something is the oldest cleanser chemistry there is: stearic, myristic, palmitic and lauric acids in positions three to nine, saponified by potassium hydroxide in sixth place. Etude Baking Powder Pore Foam is soap. Very good soap, wrapped in a Pinterest-era concept, and understanding that explains both the fan base and the tightness.
The product dates from the Etude House years, from the same budget pore-care wave that gave the brand its Wonder Pore astringent, and it has been repackaged, enlarged from 160 mL to a 300 g tube and shortened to 'Pore Foam' after the 2021 rename without any real change of character. It survived because it does something a lot of people still want. Squeeze a pea of the thick, faintly gritty paste into wet palms, and it whips into the kind of dense, marshmallow foam that Korean cleansers made famous, the sort you can turn upside down without losing. Massage it over the face and the microcrystalline cellulose and silica give a soft polish; rinse, and the skin is spotless, smooth and matte in a way syndet cleansers rarely manage.
Then it squeaks. Soap removes surface lipids and pushes the skin's naturally acidic surface toward alkaline, and the tight, squeaky after-feel is the sensation of both happening at once. Etude knew this, which is why glycerin sits first on the list, ahead of water, an unusually heavy humectant load that keeps the paste soft in the tube and takes some of the edge off. Cocamidopropyl betaine in tenth place is a modern amphoteric borrowed from gentler cleansers to stabilise the lather and reduce irritancy. The counterweights help. They do not change the base. It is worth pausing on why the base is still soap at all. Korean cleanser design spent the last decade converting almost wholesale to low-pH syndets, driven by a consumer literacy about the acid mantle that would embarrass most Western drugstores, and Etude's own SoonJung line was an early standard-bearer for that shift. Keeping a saponified foam in the catalogue is therefore not ignorance; it is a decision to serve the customers who never wanted the new thing. A dense, hot-lather soap that leaves oily skin feeling scrubbed is a sensation some people will not give up, and this tube is priced and sized for them.
Whether that matters depends entirely on whose face it is. Oily, resilient skin, particularly in a hot climate or a heavy-sunscreen routine, tends to adore this cleanser, because the thorough degreasing is the point and the skin's own oil restores comfort within the hour. Normal skin can use it as a two-or-three-nights-a-week deep cleanse and be happy. Dry, sensitive, rosacea-prone or barrier-compromised skin will find it stripping from the first wash, and the sweet powdery fragrance, listed mid-formula, adds a second reason for reactive faces to look elsewhere.
The baking powder deserves one more word, because the concept has drifted into skincare folklore. Baking soda on skin is alkaline and mildly abrasive; DIY baking-soda scrubs are a reliable way to irritate a face. Here the quantity is trivial and it dissolves in the lather, so the concern is not the bicarbonate but the soap it rides on. The real physical exfoliation is the cellulose, which is plant-derived, rounded and rinses away, a far kinder choice than the crushed shells and plastic beads of older scrubs.
What the tube offers, then, is a specific, slightly retro pleasure: a proper foaming soap with a gentle polish, a comforting smell and a size that makes it feel free. Used as the second step of an evening double cleanse, followed by a low-pH toner and a moisturizer, and kept to a few nights a week on anything but oily skin, it is a satisfying deep-clean at a price that barely registers. Used every morning and night as a daily cleanser by someone with normal or dry skin, it is a slow way to a tight, flaky face. Etude sells the gentle alternative in its own SoonJung range; this one is for people who know they want soap.
One practical note on technique, because it decides how the product is experienced. Built in the palms with plenty of water, the lather is cushiony and the cellulose barely registers; rubbed straight from the tube onto a wet face, it is a paste with grit and a soap that has not yet diluted, and that is where most of the 'harsh' reviews come from. The same tube, the same skin, two different products depending on thirty seconds in the hands.
