[Review] MISSHA Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence Intensive!

Hi, guys! 

I'm stuck at my parents' house in the suburbs until Sunday, so I thought I might as well post another review while I'm out here at their house in the woods doing nothing!

This review is for a product that I've come to absolutely love, Missha's Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence Intensive. That mouthful of a product name has become very important to me over time, because this is one of my current holy grail products. As time passes and I try out more things, that might change, but for now, I hear a choir of angels start to sing every time I reach for this in my skincare routine.

Missha advertises this as an "essence," but it's not. It's a toner! So you should use this immediately after cleansing your face. The reason this product is so special to me is I have the HARDEST time finding toners that don't burn, irritate, or dry out my super sensitive skin. Not only is this super gentle and calming to put on, but my skin afterwards feels more hydrated and super soft. Granted, the hydrated feeling doesn't last long, if I sit around and forget to finish my skincare routine I can feel my face start to dry out and get the usual dry/stinging feeling I get with every other toner. But the fact that that takes so long to happen really shows how gentle this toner is. I have never had my rosacea flare up after applying this toner, which is a miracle. 

The box that my toner came in got a little smushed in the mail, but it's still a really pretty holographic print, and it comes in handy (which I'll get more into in a second) so I kept it even though it's kinda dented. The ingredients are the important part of this product. If you are into Korean skincare, you've probably heard of the SK-II Facial Treatment Essence. If you haven't, then SK-II Facial Treatment Essence is a $100 toner that claims to, "...help[s] to improve the appearance of 5 dimensions of beautiful, crystal clear skin: spots are less visible, appearance of wrinkles is reduced, skin texture is more refined, firmness is improved, and radiance is beautifully elevated. Skin becomes breathtakingly crystal clear." 

That's a lot to expect from a toner, yet the reviews are usually positive, tons of celebrities use the SK-II essence, and many people in the beauty world have dubbed this product "miracle water." Why is this important? The Missha Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence Intensive is a dupe! 

The bottles look the same, they are both heavy frosted glass with a shiny silver screw-top; the product looks the same, both have a clear, watery consistency; the application nozzle is the same, so you have to shake both to get the product out. And then there's the important part: they have super similar ingredients. SK-II uses 90% Pitera, which is a type of yeast from the family Saccharomyces, that they own the patent for. Missha uses 80% Fissione, which is a yeast that belongs to the same family that Pitera does. In short they are very similar in formula, Missha's just has a few additional additives that makes the ingredients list slightly longer, but they are all great additions for your skin, like camomile and licorice root. And for less than a third the price ($30 on Amazon), the MIssha toner has better reviews almost across the board than the SK-II. So if you want to try the product that a lot of people have been raving about, this is a good option if you aren't able to afford the mind-blowing price of $100 for a toner. 

The Missha's Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence Intensive comes in a (beautiful) heavy glass bottle (which is annoyingly hard to photograph because it's transparent, but trust me this packing is reeeally pretty). You should be very careful handling this because it can get really slippery, especially when your hands are wet, like after cleansing your face. I keep mine in the box despite it being a bit dented because sometimes I forget to dry my hands between rinsing my foaming net after cleansing and toning, and I've dropped this bottle twice before. The sound it made made my heart jump out of my body and every time I had happily used this toner in the past flash before my eyes. It didn't smash like I thought it would, but I'm not risking it. 

The cap screws on, and doesn't click but it does lock in place, so it shouldn't come unscrewed when you don't want it to. The bottle contains 150ml of product, which doesn't sound like a lot when it comes with a $30 price tag, but I put a picture of the bottle in my hand for reference down below, and you can see that you get a lot of product. Granted, I have small hands, but the bottle itself was much bigger than I was expecting. I don't know if you can tell from the pictures since the bottle was horizontal for all of them, but I'm a little less than halfway through this bottle and I've been using it for about three months now. So this should last me 6+ months, and to pay $5/month for this toner is well worth it. 

Especially when I'm not being dramatic when I say that this toner has changed my skin game forever. I have rosacea, as I mentioned earlier, and if you don't know what that is, it's a hereditary skin condition (thanks, mom!) that makes your skin extremely sensitive, gives your skin a very red tint, and causes acne that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with hormones, so it can last your entire life. In short, my skin was constantly brightly flushed, like actually neon red/pink, all the time. Until I tried this toner. 

I'm not positive if it's either this toner alone or in combination with the Skinfood Tomato Whitening line, which I will review later this week, but once I replaced the Skinfood toner with this bad boy, it boosted the effect the Tomato line was having, and now my redness is not only diminished.... IT'S GONE.

 G O N E. 

If someone had told me that that was possible just four months ago, I would have laughed. I've suffered from horrible rosacea since I was a kid, and it literally makes me emotional to think about the changes this product has made to my skin. Granted, I'm using whitening products across the board, and have noticed that the Skinfood Tomato line was helping. I am just positive this took that process from maybe 30mph to 60mph in a very short amount of time. I mean, I still get rosacea flare-ups and some of them are pretty bad! But it's always a reaction to makeup or stress, I never wake up to my skin a bright pink shade (like I had used an entire container of blush on my face) for no reason anymore.

If I'm being honest, one thing I do dislike about the toner is the application. The nozzle for the bottle is kinda weird, you have to shake it to get the product out into your hand. Because it's a heavy bottle and the toner is a thin liquid, this makes it a bit hard to control how much product you're pouring out of the bottle. I've tried using the same number of shakes several times and will get way more product some times than I do others. I refuse to waste a drop of this, though, and usually just spread the excess down my neck and over my shoulders. 


Also, some people like to apply this using a cotton pad, but I'm going to warn you NOT to do that. Cotton pads are great for a lot of things, I use them at night with my oil cleanser to remove my makeup when I wear it, but since this toner is such a thin, watery consistency, it'll absorb all of the product into the pad, you'll need to saturate it a ton, and you'll end up wasting a lot of it. I've also heard of people pouring this into a spray bottle, which seems like an interesting idea but I'd be too scared of the bottle leaking or of the spray being too wide and wasting product. What I do, and what I recommend you do, too, if you have somewhat steady hands and can clench your fingers together in a bowl shape really tight, is just shake some of this out into your palm, dip the fingers of your other hand into the little puddle, and wipe it all over your face! If you're not careful some of it can leak out between your fingers, but I usually just use a finger to wipe the leaks up off my hand and wipe them back on my face. It takes a bit of practice but it uses 100% of the product that you get out of the bottle, and ensures you can apply it where you need to. 

♡Ingredients list :
Saccharomyces Ferment Filtrate (80%), Propanediol,Glycyrrhiza Glabra ( Licorice Root Extract ), Niacinamide, Polyquaternium-51, Bifida Ferment Lysate, Ulmus Davidiana Root Extract, Raffinose, Amaranthus Caudatus Seed, Piper Methysticum Leaf/Root Extract, Centella Asiatica Extract, Beta Vulgaris (Beet) Root, Portulaca Oleracea Extract, Rosmarinus Officinalis, Chamomile Extract, Phellodendron Amurense Bark, Cassia Alata Leaf Extract, Sodium Hyaluronate, Hydrogenated Lecithin, Glycerin, Pentylene Glycol, Hydrolyzed Corn Starch, Tromethamine, Water, Adenosine, Ethylhexylglycerin, Lactic Acid, Phenoxyethanol


♡Pros:

• it comes in a really nice glass bottle
• it's great for sensitive skin 
• it nearly completely eliminated my rosacea redness
• it isn't drying or harsh
• it's dupe for SK-II 
• the price isn't bad for what you get!

♡Cons:

• it doesn't have super efficient application

♡Repurchase?

• Definitely. Until I find a better toner, you will have to pry this from my cold dead hands before I give it up