The Best Korean Pore Strips to Totally Annihilate Gunked-Up Pores
Lauren Hubbard
Pore strips are a sort of pseudo-guilty beauty pleasure. The deep, almost perverse, satisfaction-slash-disgust that you get from looking at your used, gunked-filled pore strip is so wonderful, it’s almost guilt-inducing. And, for a long time, the cult-classic Biore strips were the only game in town when it came to getting your weekly peel-off fix. But thanks to an influx of beauty products from the pore-passionate Korean skincare scene, the internet is now filled with new—and sometimes bizarre—innovations for all you pore-strip aficionados. And because we care about your pores, we found the very best and most-effective strips to fulfill all of your guilty pleasures. But before we let you loose, we must first give you a little biology lesson that is about to destroy your whole brain: The mountains of gunk sitting on your pore strip aren’t actually blackheads.
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We know; your whole life is a lie. Those little yellow spikes you spent hours eradicating in high school are, for most people, just sebaceous filaments—accumulations of your skin’s natural oil in the tiny hair follicles all over your face. Sure, they look like blackheads and act like blackheads, but unlike blackheads, which are caused by oxidized oil and dead skin cells in your pores, sebaceous filaments are just a natural part of how your skin works. Which means that they should, ideally, be left alone.
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But if the smattering of dots on your nose is something you just can’t deal with, pore strips can be a good, albeit temporary, solution (those filaments are genetic, so they’re just going to keep coming back after each strip). If you are planning to add strips into your weekly routine, make them more effective by exfoliating the skin, first. “Gently removing dead cells from the skin’s surface may actually help make pore strips work better,” says Joshua Zeichner, MD, director of cosmetic and clinical research at the department of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center. “Just make sure not to overdo it, because over-exfoliating may increase your risk for irritation.”
Alright—you may now return to your regularly scheduled, pore-obsessed reading. We wish your sebaceous filaments well, and may they RIP.
