Read the first ten ingredients and the category changes. Water, dimethicone, isododecane, polysilicone-11, glycerin, butylene glycol, a triglyceride, PEG-10 dimethicone, a preservative, panthenol: that is the opening of a very good luxury primer, and further down the silicone architecture keeps building, a silsesquioxane powder for soft focus, trimethylsiloxysilicate resin for hold, cyclopentasiloxane for slip, a vinyl dimethicone crosspolymer for cushion, dimethiconol for gloss. Nine silicones and silicone derivatives, arranged by people who know exactly what each does to light and touch, and the result is the most persuasive minute any product in this batch will ever have: the essence glides on like silk, sets to a soft-focus, luminous, powder-satin finish, and leaves pores and fine lines visibly softened before the emulsion goes on. The brand calls that regeneration. The label calls it a primer with an excellent humectant base, and the honest review has to start there, because everything else on the list, fifty-odd herbs, ginseng twice, oyster shell, a daylily, an orchid-derived complex with plant acids at the tail, real gold, is the price of the bottle rather than the reason the mirror looks better.
The hydration beneath the film is real and well done. Glycerin fifth, butylene glycol, propanediol, panthenol tenth, sodium PCA fourteenth, sorbitol and sodium hyaluronate twenty-sixth make a humectant stack any clinical brand would be proud of, and the plumped feel it produces persists under the silicones through the day; used twice daily for two or three weeks, skin looks fresher, more even and better rested, which is what consistent hydration in a good vehicle produces and which the product deserves credit for. Saccharomyces lysate and a cocoa seed extract in the thirties add a little conditioning; Chondrus crispus, the carrageenan seaweed, adds slip. For normal, combination and dry skin the texture is close to perfect as a base for makeup, and even oily skin will find the finish powdery rather than greasy.
It is worth being precise about what the silk does and does not do over time, because the brand's copy elides the two. The soft-focus finish is a film; it washes off at night and is reapplied in the morning, and the pores and lines it softens are softened again rather than smaller. The hydration underneath does accumulate, in the sense that consistently watered skin looks and behaves better after a fortnight than after a day, but that is the humectants' work and would follow from any decent hydrating serum. Nothing in the bottle remodels the dermis, and a buyer who understands that will be delighted by the mirror every morning; one who expected the mirror to change permanently will be looking for the regeneration by week three and not finding it.
Then the prescription, and it should be read as one. Ginseng, listed twice at forty-first and forty-second, heads the Cheongibidan blend the brand attributes to the beauty rituals of the Qing court's Empress Dowager Cixi, and fifty-odd roots, flowers, fruits and fungi follow it to the tail, with Phellinus and Ganoderma mushrooms, mistletoe and oyster shell among them, at doses that cannot be measured; the daylily of the Royal Cheonchohwa, one of the two ingredients the 2023 relaunch was built on, sits eighty-fourth beside the gold, and the plant acids of the Hwayulseokgok Complex, quercetin, beta-sitosterol, ursolic, linoleic and rosmarinic acids, cedrol and tocopherol, occupy the last places before the preservative and the perfume. Every one of those compounds has laboratory antioxidant or anti-inflammatory data at concentrations this essence is unlikely to reach, none has a clinical study on human skin as part of this complex, and LG has published no testing of the product. The oyster shell makes it non-vegan; the gold, mica, titanium dioxide and iron oxide make it faintly luminous.
The perfume is the one thing to be firm about. The line's rich, powdery oriental-herbal scent is declared here with seven allergens, benzyl benzoate, hydroxycitronellal, geraniol, limonene, hexyl cinnamal, citronellol and linalool, on a leave-on treatment for ageing skin, a population in which rosacea, eczema and fragrance allergy are common; there is no alcohol, which is a mercy compared with the balancer, but a strong fragrance under a silicone film is a strong fragrance held against the skin for hours. Resilient faces will enjoy it; reactive ones should not try it, and the sensitive-skin language on the box should be weighed against the seven names on the label.
On price the essence stands apart even within its own line. The brand has no US store, the Korean retail price is 370,000 won, and importers list the 50 ml bottle anywhere from around a hundred and seventy to well over three hundred dollars, so somewhere between sixty and a hundred dollars a month at a pump twice daily, for a product whose measurable work, a silk-finish film over excellent humectants, a fragrance-free primer and a hydrating serum would reproduce for a tenth of the money. The rest is the filigree cap, the red enamel crown, the fifty herbs, the gold and the imperial story, and those are worth what a buyer feels they are worth. As an object, it is one of the most beautifully made things in the catalogue; as a treatment, it is a primer that hydrates, and the regeneration it promises would need a retinoid, sunscreen and time, none of which is in the bottle.
