[Review] Juicyful Vitalizer Tone Up Cream

When I first saw that I won the chance to review this product on Jolse for free, I was super excited because I love "whitening" creams since they are usually made to help even out your skin tone. What I didn't notice until it arrived at my doorstep is that this doesn't just have the "whitening" ingredients I was thinking of (like my favorite, niacinamide) – it also has Titanium Dioxide, which is a physical sunscreen! So this product isn't just intended to even out the skin tone, but also for actually making your skin look brighter by adding a bit of white (titanium dioxide or zinc oxide is what makes that sunscreen look white and chalky).

I'll elaborate more about my thoughts on this below. First, here is the packaging for this product:

It says intensive moisturizer, so I was expecting a creamy consistency perhaps. Here are the ingredients (click HERE to see the CosDNA analysis):

I like the niacinamide and the grapeseed oil because they are up there in the ingredient list, and I can see a couple silicone-type ingredients up top that make it feel silky/smooth and hopefully will help with creating a good makeup base. The Titanium dioxide in there is what really surprised me – there's no sign of "SPF" on this box anywhere as far as I can tell:

It's in a squeeze tube, which is nice & hygienic:

The cap snaps open and shut in a satisfying way and feels sturdy:

It has a light sunscreen scent (which I really think is the titanium dioxide in there). It really reminds me of the smell of that Coppertone-brand sunscreen. Here are a couple swatches:

It came out bright white… that, coupled with the sunscreen smell really made me think "uh-oh". But, luckily, it did live up to its "intensive moisturizer" claim and blended in just like regular lotion. It didn't feel heavy at all, and it bordered on feeling hydrating instead of moisturizing. It felt light and absorbed very easily, and that bright white color didn't stay, but you could tell that it brightened up that area on my hand a bit:

It didn't break me out, which was one concern of mine! I used it on my face several times since these pictures and my makeup always blended very well on top of it. I actually started to use this as my makeup primer lately because it makes my skin feel soft and creates a nice base. It dries down to a natural finish instead of dewy, which I have found works better underneath foundations than my dewy-finish Missha sunscreen! On real sunny days I can even layer this on top my Missha sunscreen and it still works.

For me, the fact that it makes my skin a tad whiter is not the appealing part of this product. That's something that might appeal more to the East Asians in Taiwan/Japan/China/Korea, whose beauty standards lean towards porcelain-type skin. For me, I just want my foundation to match my skin color and I don't want long-term skin damage!

The reason I ended up liking this product is that it turned out to be a good base underneath my makeup and it made my skin feel soft. I'd personally prefer to not have the extra white color in there from the Titanium dioxide, but on the plus side, it's very subtle and I can't tell once my makeup is on. For people that do want that effect, I'd recommend using this alone without makeup for no-makeup days, because once you put foundation on, that effect seems lost to me.

Overall, I like this product and I will use it up, but I'm not sure I would repurchase because of the Titanium dioxide creating a slight white cast. Even though it's subtle, I'd really much rather have a base for my makeup without that because that's just not what I need! Still, it is a nice product and if you are looking for something to brighten your skin a bit, this would work really, really well and still come off as natural-looking.

Because of these factors, I give this a 4/6 using my scale:

As a bonus, I have some pictures comparing this product to another "whitening" product that uses physical sunscreen, from the brand Miss Hana. I picked it up while I was in Taiwan.

Here are the pictures comparing the two (Juicyful's comes out as the obvious superior product here):

 

The consistency of the one on the right is pretty chalky and doesn't blend out as easily. It also has a strong pink color to it. If I wanted to find a product that made my skin bright/lighter, I'd definitely choose the Juicyful product.

As always, I hope that this helped! And thank you Jolse for the opportunity to review this product. All my statements above are my own! ❤️