These days, it seems there are two kinds of people: those who love a good old-fashioned facial scrub, and those who either won’t, or can’t, take so much as a single exfoliating grain on their skin. (A damaged acid mantle and/or prescription retinoids can make skin extremely sensitive to abrasion, for example.)

Mizon’s Seaweed Jelly Scrub is a scrub for those of you in the second group, who want to smooth away some stray flakes of skin but can’t just pick up any old scrub and scrub away.

Purpose: Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub is a mild facial exfoliating scrub.

Do not use if: You are sensitive to seaweed, plant extracts, salicylic acid, fragrance, or anything else in the ingredients list.

When and how to use: After cleansing, squeeze a generous amount of product out of tube and apply to dry face. Gently massage for a few minutes, then rinse off. Continue with your usual skincare routine.

Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub ingredients:  Water, glycerin, butylene glycol, sodium polyacrylate, oryza sativa (rice) powder, sodium hyaluronate, sapindus mukurossi fruit extract, caulerpa lentillifera extract (seaweed), glucomannan (konjac), amber powder, camellia sinensis leaf powder, undaria pinnatifida powder (seaweed), salicylic acid, polysorbate 60, ammonium acryloyldimethyltaurate/VP copolymer, methyl chloro isothiazolinone, xanthan gum, methyl isothiazolinone, chlorphenesin, 1,2-hexanediol, fragrance

pH (provided because this is a sort of cleansing product, and it’s water-based, so let’s just be safe): 6

Notable ingredients: Mizon markets this as a mild exfoliating scrub, and the ingredients list supports that. No harsh, jagged, abrasive, potentially face-damaging crushed-up walnut shells or apricot pits or diamond dust or giant salt crystals here. Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub gets its skin-smoothing abilities from rice powder (which also has some nice brightening potential), powdered amber (the smoothness of which makes it particularly gentle in comparison to other, more common scrubbing particles), and konjac!

Yep, that’s right. Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub contains actual bits of soft, squishy, ultra-gentle konjac in it to sweep away flakies without a hint of irritation.

In addition to the exfoliating agents, Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub also contains two different seaweed extracts. I won’t launch into another rant on the benefits of seaweed for skin, except to note that seaweed’s hydrating, moisturizing, and antioxidant properties are always welcome in my skincare stash. The seaweed extracts are in the middle of the ingredients list, where most products would already be listing components below the 1% line, but konjac is in that area as well, and there’s a ton of konjac in this scrub. I’m guessing, therefore, that Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub actually contains fairly significant amounts of the titular ingredient! Yay.

I plugged the ingredients into CosDNA, which returned an almost completely clean report. As long as you aren’t sensitive to butylene glycol, the chances of Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub working for you are very good.

Performance

Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub is a light, watery gel  thickened and made slightly grainy-feeling by the addition of ground up konjac root.

In the same way that a konjac sponge gets puffy and jelly-like when soaked with water, the konjac bits here are soft due to their immersion in the product’s water base.

It has a light, clean, earthy green fragrance, and it feels cool and refreshing on the skin.

I started using this scrub while I was trying to rehabilitate my skin after my disastrous encounter with the Su:m37 White Award Bubble-De Mask. I desperately wanted to smooth out the texture of my cheeks a little, but I didn’t want to risk further irritating or drying out my skin. Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub turned out to be absolutely perfect for the job.

I’m not kidding when I say that this is the most gentle scrub I’ve ever used. It’s so gentle that “scrub” doesn’t even seem to be the right word for it. “Softener” would be better, if Korean skincare companies hadn’t already claimed that word for toners. As you massage this over your face, you won’t feel any abrasiveness at all. The squishy konjac bits and the smooth and very finely ground rice and amber powders sweep lightly and smoothly over the skin with hardly any friction at all. Massaging the gel around produces a weirdly adorable wet crackly noise, like the rapid-fire squishing of a million tiny konjac sponges.

As an added bonus, Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub is soothing and hydrating thanks to anti-inflammatory ingredients like camellia sinensis leaf powder and salicylic acid and humectants like glycerin and hyaluronic acid. In fact, I like to leave it to soak on my face for a few minutes before I begin massaging, to allow my skin to take in some of that seaweedy goodness.

While this isn’t a super intensive scrub by any means, Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub works wonderfully for smoothing and soothing flaky skin caused by dryness or irritation. And it rinses away clean, leaving no residue behind to further irritate or clog pores. Ever since my skin recovered from the Su:m37 incident, it has felt softer and smoother than it did before. I haven’t added any other exfoliators to my routine, so I feel very comfortable giving Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub the credit for this recent improvement.

Conclusion: If you’re expecting a scrub along the lines of the notorious St. Ives Apricot Scrub (which, by the way, don’t use that on your face), then Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub is not for you. But if you want to polish away some flakes and roughness without risking damage or overexfoliation, and/or if you’re using other topicals that make your skin more sensitive than usual, this may turn out to be your new favorite scrub. I’ve used Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub almost every day since I got it with no ill effects whatsoever, and I’m more pleased with the results every time. It’s amazing that something so soft and gentle can be so effective. If you can’t tell yet, I’m in love with this product and will be happy to buy more when it runs out. Having an ultra-mild scrub in the stash is a great idea in case of emergency (or as a regular supplement to chemical exfoliation), and as an ultra-mild scrub, Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub performs its job perfectly.

Rating: 5/5

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Where can I buy Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub?

Peach and Lily carries Mizon Seaweed Jelly Scrub.

What’s your favorite gentle scrub?