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It always cracks me up when people describe me as someone who’s tried just about everything in Korean skincare, because that’s far from the truth. There are so many product categories I’ve barely touched. One of those categories is the powdered foaming cleanser, which only came to my attention when my friend Cat at Snow White and the Pear reviewed the Su:m37 White Award Enzyme Powder Wash back in June. That was around the same time that I was beginning to discover Tosowoong, so when I spotted a powder cleanser among their products and read its claims to pH 5.5 status, I snatched it up. Thank the snail gods I did. My skin adores this stuff so much that I’ll find it difficult to switch to any other cleanser.Get more news about Enzyme Powder Tosowoong,you can vist our website!

Purpose: Tosowoong Enzyme Powder Wash is a pH 5.5 foaming facial cleanser that claims to deep-clean skin without drying it out.

Do not use if: Your skin truly cannot tolerate sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), alcohol denat., or anything else in the ingredients list. But if you are avoiding those ingredients because you’re afraid they’ll be too stripping, read this review first.
When and how to use: Shake a small amount of cleanser into the palm of your hand or onto a damp cleansing tool. Add water and lather. Gently massage over your face, then rinse thoroughly.

Tosowoong Enzyme Powder Wash ingredients: Zea mays (corn) starch, sodium lauroyl aspartate, sodium cocoyl isethionate, sodium palmitate, sodium lauryl sulfate, titanium dioxide, dipotassium glycyrrhizate, methylparaben, alcohol denat., perfume, maltodextrin, papain, badger oil

CosDNA analysis turns up a couple of major flags in this list. SLS rates a 5 as a potential acne trigger, while alcohol denat. scores a 5 as a potential irritant. Once again, however, I definitely urge you to read on before you allow those ingredients to put you off.
Notable ingredients: Typically I use this section to talk about the potentially beneficial ingredients I find in a product’s ingredients list, but here I’m going to take a different approach and talk about the ingredients that many people consider dealbreakers. SLS, for example, is almost universally panned by those who know a bit about skincare. It’s known as the harshest of the sulfates and considered a one-way ticket to stripped, dried skin, even among people who haven’t yet seen the pH 5.5 light. Alcohol denat. is often shunned for much the same reasons.

What I’ve found from my month and a half of using this product is that when you’re trying to assess how stripping a cleanser will be, the ingredients may not matter quite as much as the pH. This is because the mechanism by which a cleanser strips and dries out skin (or doesn’t) isn’t quite as clear-cut as “sulfates bad, SLS devil.” My theory, developed over the last month and a half, is that in order for the sulfates to do your moisture barrier harm, the pH of the cleanser itself must be damagingly high.

What happens is that an alkaline cleanser will weaken the structure of your acid mantle. If you attack your skin with soaps or with surfactants like SLS while it is in that compromised state, then those surfactants can indeed bind to and wash away many of the natural and necessary lipids that are meant to remain in your moisture barrier. But if the cleanser is at a skin-safe pH, the acid mantle’s integrity remains intact. The surfactants are unable to make off with your ceramides and lipids and happy fatty acids. That’s my theory, anyway, and my reading supports it (more in-depth post on this coming soon). I came up with this theory because of how Tosowoong Enzyme Powder Wash makes my skin feel.

(This theory is also the reason I disagree with people who say that using a strong, alkaline cleanser is okay if you “balance” your skin’s pH with a balancing toner afterward. The damage is being done during the act of cleansing. Attempting to rapidly lower your skin’s pH after the fact won’t fix that unless your balancing toner can travel back in time, slap the high-pH cleanser out of your hands, and replace it with a pH 5.5 cleanser, and if your toner could do that, you wouldn’t be reading this review because the space/time continuum would be terribly damaged and none of us would be here anymore because your toner probably would have prevented us all from existing in the first place. Skin pH returns to normal not long after cleansing anyway. Shortening that period by a half an hour isn’t going to undo the harm that was caused by the cleansing process.)