The tube prints a pH, 5.5 plus or minus 0.6, in a pale green circle under the name, and that small act of disclosure is worth reading properly. A cleanser's pH matters because alkaline soap foams, at nine or ten, disrupt the skin's mildly acidic surface for hours after the rinse, and a wash at 5.5 does not; it is also a number that says nothing about the surfactants, which decide whether a cleanser strips, and a sulfate wash at 5.5 would still leave dry skin tight. What makes this tube's roundel meaningful is that the list behind it agrees with it: sodium cocoyl isethionate at second, the syndet surfactant of gentle cleansing bars, with sodium cocoyl glycinate at fourth, coco-betaine at fifth and sodium methyl cocoyl taurate at eighth, a four-surfactant system chosen for low protein stripping and a creamy lather. The pH is a promise about the acid mantle, the surfactants are a promise about the barrier, and the tube keeps both for less than twelve dollars.
The rest of the list is a plain, competent cream foam. Glycerin at third is the humectant that survives the rinse, coconut acid and glyceryl stearate build the cream, stearyl alcohol and sodium chloride give it body, and a set of glycols with hydroxyacetophenone preserves it; polyquaternium-67 at seventeenth is a cationic conditioning polymer that deposits a faint soft film and is the reason the rinse feels conditioned rather than squeaky, a trick more often seen in shampoo than in facial foam and a good one here. Salicylic acid at sixteenth, kept in its active form by the pH, is a slight pore assist during the wash and the reason the foam suits mildly congested skin a shade better than the brand's bubble foam; centella asiatica extract at nineteenth is declared at 3,700 ppm, a third of a percent, an honest figure that puts it where it is, a colour and a note. Allantoin and panthenol at twentieth and twenty-first are the anti-irritants, Scots pine leaf oil at twenty-second is the one fragrant material and the only sensitiser note beyond the coco-betaine, and a tail of wheat sprout, broccoli, cabbage, alfalfa, radish and rapeseed extracts is the brand's habit of listing a salad on a wash. There is no fragrance, alcohol, sulfate or silicone.
In use it is the foam a person reaches for without thinking about it. A pea of thick white cream foams in wet hands into a dense, creamy lather, cleans thoroughly in thirty seconds and rinses completely, and the skin afterwards is smooth and soft with a faint conditioned feel and none of the pull a foam usually leaves; combination and oily skin get a proper morning wash and a second cleanse that handles sunscreen and light makeup, normal skin gets a good daily one, and dry skin finds, unusually for a cream foam, that it can use it twice a day without paying for it in tightness. Reactive skin mostly tolerates it well, with the pine oil and betaine the things to patch-test, and a very compromised barrier may feel the salicylic acid as a faint tingle and should take the brand's bubble foam for a flare week; fungal-acne-prone skin should note the coconut acid and glyceryl stearate. Over a week or two a congested chin looks a little clearer, which is what a mild foam with a hint of BHA does, and nothing beyond that, because a cleanser is a cleanser.
The brand's range logic deserves a sentence. IUNIK's Centella line sells three cleansers, an airy bubble foam for the most reactive skin, this cream foam for everyone in the middle, and a cleansing oil for the first step, and the mild foam is the one most faces should start with, since it cleans more than the bubble foam and strips less than the calendula gel in the brand's other line; the pH roundel and the ppm figure are the brand's disclosure habits at their most useful, and the botanical tail is its disclosure habit at its most decorative. The product has a few years of sale, ten reviews at a 4.8 on the brand's store and wider distribution whose counts could not be verified, no published testing, and the assessment rests on the list, which is short enough to trust.
Eleven dollars and seventy cents for 120 ml is about six dollars a month at a pea twice a day, among the cheapest syndet foams available and a third of what Western brands charge for the same isethionate-and-glycinate chemistry with a printed pH; the centella and the salad cost nothing and add little, and the conditioning polymer and the surfactant choice are the value. Combination, normal and oily skin that wants a dense, unscented, non-stripping daily foam will find it hard to beat at the price, dry skin gets a rare cream foam it can use twice a day, and anyone who has been paying twenty dollars for a syndet cleanser should read this tube's second line. A number on the front, a list that agrees with it, and a cleanser that costs less than the coffee it takes to read the review.
