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I Tried A Korean Skin Care Routine For A Month And This Is What Happened

Excuse me while I adopt a whole Eastern lifestyle. Thx!

What's up y'all! Essence, beauty editor here at BuzzFeed, and I committed to trying a Korean skin care regimen for a month. I lived my entire teens and twenties with barely any breakouts, but when I hit the big 3-0, my hormones got wacky and my skin started breaking out, ESPECIALLY around the time of my period!

To combat my skin problems, I met with Charlotte Cho, cofounder of Soko Glam — one of the biggest online retailers for Korean beauty products. She's also an esthetician, so I went to her office and had her look at my face to tell me what the heck was going on with my skin and recommend me a full K-beauty (Korean beauty) skincare routine.

Now if you're not up on game, K-beauty is REALLY known for its skin care. There are 10 steps total, although, fun fact: You don't have to do each step every single morning and night.

For my concerns — hormonal breakouts and hyper-pigmentation after — Charlotte prescribed the below products. I know it seems like a lot, but I didn't use every single product every single day, and some of them I didn't use at all. Each product is numbered to correlate with one of the steps above, and a brief description of what they do is below:

So the devil began testing me two days into week one and I got a pimple on the right side of my chin that Thursday night. But I applied Canadian Pore Cleanser and a Pimple Master Patch, and it was legit gone the next morning. I was shooketh!

By week two, a stubborn pimple that had been on the left side of my nose for about two weeks was completely gone, and blemishes on my cheeks were already fading.

So I know the lighting is clearly brighter in the the wk. three pic, but light aside, the blemishes on my right cheek were visibly less noticeable.

By week four I was completely sold! I had minimal breakouts and my skin's evenness was starting to restore.

In regards to Korean skin care, it's gon' be a yes for me!

Lmk in the comments below what other beauty treatments, regimens, rituals, literally whatever, you wanna learn more about.