Review: Mizon Snail Repair Intensive Ampoule

The one and only absolute skincare rule is YMMV, your mileage may vary. Basically it says that things which work well for one person's skin may not work at all for other people, and one that brings disaster for one may be amazing for others. This is why patch testing is a thing to make sure that at least your whole face don't get wrecked. (I don't do it, though. I really should.)

Mizon has a very famous snail line, and some reviewers and the good peeps at r/asianbeauty have said that it has amazing properties like the ability to repair skin texture (!!!) and help with scarring (!!!!!). Me being a person who has done very stupid things and have very stupid things done to my skin, naturally posses some mild scarring here and there. Pitted scars from squeezing at sebaceous filaments on my nose, some scars from milia extractions done by my derm that didn't heal properly, chicken pox scars, and a scar on my cheek which I've had since childhood and may have been caused by me scratching my own face. Not to mention my legs and the many, many times I fall or scratch them badly on weird shit like metal wires or the sides of rented ice skating shoes. I was of course very tempted to get my hands on some of those snail magic goodness and banish my scarring issues.

I wanted to get their famous snail cream in the pink squeeze bottle at first, but I realise I already have some occlusive stuff in my routine so why put more in? I decided to get their ampoule, the Mizon Snail Repair Intensive Ampoule. I bought it off a Tokopedia merchant for 189000 IDR, which is around $14. So it's pretty cheap, which is always a good thing.

 The bottle has a dropper, which is nice to make sure it's hygienic

It comes in a pretty heavy glass bottle, which is tinted brown to reduce exposure to sunlight. It comes with a dropper and the ampoule itself is white with a tinge of yellow in colour.

The texture is pretty slimy, viscous at first but pretty much what you can imagine snail mucin feels like. It does claim to consist of 80% snail mucin. 

It feels a bit viscous at first, but once you start spreading it it turns almost watery and sinks into your skin pretty well. It can feel a bit sticky but settles down and leaves skin feeling moisturized.

It contains Snail Secretion Filtrate, Sodium Hyaluronate, Butylene Glycol, Glycerin, Alcohol, Panthenol, Glycereth-26, Punica Granatum Extract, Theobroma Cacao (cocoa) Extract, Carbomer, Triethanolamine, Trehalose, Copper Tripeptide-1, Human Ogliopeptide-1, Palmitoyl Pentapeptide-4, Cornus Officinalis Fruit Extract, Nelumbo Nucifera Flower Extract, Caprylyl Glyocol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Tropolone, Sodium Polyacrylate, Adenosine, Coptis Japonica Extract, and Disodium Edta. Snail mucin is definitely high up their ingredient list together with HA. It does contain alcohol, but doesn't seem to have much of it. It has pomegranate (punica granatum) extract together with cacao extract pretty high up and also Japanese cornel and coptis japonica (japanese goldthread in the middle and second last respectively.

I have had the Mizon Snail Ampoule for more than 3 weeks now. I use it as a regular ampoule and also sometimes put it into a diy mask. I am sad to say that I have to discontinue it's use due to breakouts. I can definitely say that it probably helped me a little bit with the smaller scars on my nose due to SF squeezing. One of those scars definitely got a tad smaller. It wasn't a big change, but it's pretty impressive to have shown something 2 weeks in. However, some tiny acne popped up from this product so I have to discontinue using it for a while.

Sorry for the nightmares this pic gives you lol,

but as you can see some new acne popped up

on my chin, one on top of my left brow and near my nose

some of those pih has faded now due to some products I will review later

Who knows? Maybe one day I'll try it again and maybe my skin will like it better this time. After all, our skin changes throughout our lives and things that worked well for us can stop working eventually and things that doesn't work now may work well in the future. I've been using it on my legs since the other parts of my skin seems to love this product just fine, so I definitely still have some usage out of it.

All in all, it's a pretty good product for a very good price and it's too bad but it just didn't work for me.

I rate this product 7/10 for the nice packaging, good price and great use. But unfortunately a 1/10 on the buy it again scale.