When a soft body skin junkie gives Korean beauty products one more try, she’s pleasantly surprised. Here, her 3-step routine for achieving soft body skin.
Of all my accomplishments in life, having silky soft body skin AT ALL TIMES is one of my crowning glories.
It’s not an easy feat. I have ridiculously dry, flaky, eczema-prone skin. I scrub, shave, and slather my way to soft skin every day. I’ve tried a lot of Korean body products in the past, from skincare to hair care, and they’ve left a lot to be desired. I’ve always felt that any of the lotions and moisturizers I’ve tried smelled nice but lacked a lot in the moisturizing department. For that reason, I took up just using straight up shea butter and coconut oil while I lived in Korea because I could never find anything in the stores that worked for me.
But in my quest to try all that K-beauty has to offer, I decided to give K-beauty body products another chance. I wanted to see if I could achieve my signature soft skin using Korean products only. And spoiler alert — DING DING DING — so many winners, folks! Read more for my steps to glowing skin, plus my favorite K-beauty body products.
Step 1: The Bath
My first step is to take a long shower. I use my normal body wash (raise your hand if you use at least 12 different ones depending on your mood — I can’t be the only one), and then after my shower, I run a hot, steaming bath, just like the hot baths you’d find at the Korean spa. Everyone talks about drinking water (and yes, everyone should be drinking tons of water), but baths are also really helpful for aiding in the hydration of your skin. If I want to take it up a notch, I add in some bath salts or oils and relax for at least 20 minutes.
Step 2: The Scrub
Step 2 is my favorite. After I soak in the bath, I scrub my body with a Korean Italy towel. What is a Korean Italy towel, you ask? It’s a lightweight, exfoliating body washcloth that they typically use in the jjimjilbang to remove all of your dead skin. They’re incredibly popular in Korea, and once I discovered their magical dead skin-removing magic, I never looked back. While I’ll never be as good as the ajummas at the K-spa who will literally scrub you until you can see the dead skin rolling off of your body in piles (so gross, yet extremely satisfying), I can still get the job done.
I should advise you though that if you have sensitive skin, you might find the exfoliating cloth a bit too much too handle. But you know me — I always come through with options. For my friends with delicate skin, the A’Pieu Smooth Body Peeling Gel Perfect. It’s a gommage exfoliating gel formulated with fruit extracts that gently sloughs away dead skin, revealing soft, smooth limbs. An additional bonus: The packaging is also to die for! It looks like the plastic tube version of an exfoliating towel. ADORABLE.
Step 3: The Glowing Grand Finale
After showering, soaking in the bath, exfoliating and rinsing off, it’s time for the grand finale: the moisturizer. I thought I’d never find a Korean body lotion that was suitable for my dry skin, but girl. The Iope Body Clinic Master Cream is my new favorite thing. The thick but extremely easy to spread cream is both soothing and moisturizing. It’s fragrance-free, perfect for layering underneath your favorite perfumes. It’s also free from synthetic dyes, animal by-products and mineral oil, for all those sensitive skin people out there. AND it’s been clinically tested to provide at least 72 hours of moisture. Do you want to know how much I love this lotion? Once I couldn’t squeeze any more out, I cut open the top to scrape out the last bits. Yeah. It’s good.
But what is moisturizing without a good, healthy dose of GLOW? For my final step, I like to use a bit of oil to add a subtle sheen to my body. I not only want to feel moisturized and hydrated, but I want to look like it, too. (Hashtag teamglow for life.) The Illi Perfect Balancing Body Oil is the perfect K-beauty body care product to add to your glow arsenal. It’s formulated with traditional hanbang ingredients such as ginseng root extract, rice bran oil, and camellia seed oil. It has a wonderfully smooth texture that sinks into the skin immediately — no sticky, tacky, or greasy feeling. And it leaves behind the most wonderful glow. There’s a light fragrance, but it doesn’t last on the skin, which is ideal for me since I’m a perfume junkie.
And BOOM! My experiment with K-beauty body care products was a huge success. What are your favorite ways to get silky soft body skin? Let me know in the comments!
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