2017 S/S Holy Grail : A’pieu Sea Buckthorn Cream - Review M 30
If 2016 was a year of centella asiatica and its active ingredient madecassoide & Asiatic acids, spring/summer 2017 is the year of sea buckthorn, aka vitamin tree. I think the first company who brought this into market is 23 years old's C-tragel Cream. Well, they called this "Sea Buckthorn cream" but ingredient was somewhat disappointing, containing just noticeable amount of sea buckthorn oil. (I’m not saying their ingredients are bad, I am just talking about “sea buckthorn contents”.)
Well, concept-plagiarism is not a praiseworthy yet prevalent in Korean beauty but at the same time, we can always get better or cheaper products as times goes by from other brands. A’pieu’s Sea-Buckthorn cream is also one of these kinds. It’s simply better, and amazingly cheaper.
First impression
I generally do not say “Oh my god, this is my absolute favorite.” As you all know, we sell lots of products and should maintain good business relationship with lots of Korean manufacturer & vendors, so I cannot write overly honest by saying “Oh, this one is just so much better than that.”
But let me tell you, A'pieu's Sea-Buckthorn Cream is my second wow, holy-grail, Jesus Christ product for me after Elensilia’s Escargot Original Repair Cream. As you can see, this is in my 2017 S/S Routine as well. A’pieu’s Sea Buckthorn cream has minimally sticky and amazingly moisturizing texture. The texture is soft and light without much oily layering yet maintains moisture extremely well. It absorbs quick, I mean literally absorbs, unlike many other “fast absorbing, joking actually it is just fast evaporating” type of gel creams. It leaves light-lemony scent from its main ingredient sea buckthorn without added fragrance. Again, it is only minimally sticky so you can wear foundation right on, unlike many other deep-moisturizers.
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Ingredients
Perfection. Actually, it’s my first time to see all EWG green products in cream. (you can easily see it from toner because you don’t have to consider viscosity, moisturizing and consistency in toner at all.) 40% vitamin C rich sea buckthorn ingredient is used as base and they circumvent the use of phenoxyethanol with high contents of 1,2, hexanediol. Our favorite ingredient niacinamide is used as brightening factor, and adenosine is used for anti-aging ingredient. Good thing that is they used cetyl ethylhexonate as emollient (this is where many companies use EWG level 3 or 4 ingredient) and to maintain freshness, methylpropanediol is used instead of denatured alcohol. (Just lovely). Skin repairing panthenol appears relatively early in the ingredient list with moisturizing camellia seed oil. In terms of ingredient, it cannot be better than this.
After Thought
I admire Apieu's sophisticated formula. There were lots of unconventional ingredients in terms of emollient and solvent to avoid certain ingredients. The fact that they used Sea Buckthorn extract as base. I know, you know and we all know, 25ppm ingredient won’t do a thing on your skin. So if you want to benefit from extract, choose a product which has certain ingredient as its base, just like this amazingly made cream.
PROS: amazing texture, amazing ingredient, moisturizing.
CONS: container. I wish it were a pump type cream.
IDEA: One of my favorite products this year
