Over the past few years I’ve been a huge fan of the K beauty brand, Purito. It’s a bold statement, but if I had to pick just one brand to buy all of my routine products from, it might just be them! I love the way their formulations are always super gentle, rarely overusing acids and vitamin C like so many other brands currently do.
If you’ve been around the skincare block, you’ll have heard of what was previously my all-time favourite sunscreen, Purito’s Centella Green Level Unscented SPF. In case not, I’ll fill you in: unfortunately, in 2020 it was outed that the sunscreen did not actually offer the SPF50 that it claimed to, and instead was tested and deemed to offer only SPF19. This then led to tonnes of other K beauty brands re-testing their SPFs with alternative testing facilities, and many others had similarly disappointing results.
2020 was the year we all had to re-enter the (quite scary, tbh) SPF market and do a bunch of trial and error to find our new favourites. If you’re reading this, you’re probably on that hunt too! It can be a super messy journey and I do not envy you, you have my support. Hopefully my review of one of Purito’s will help you along in your search, one way or another.
I know, I know. The hottest topic after the 2020 K beauty scandal was: can you trust K beauty brands? In fact, they got a lot of hate! I personally think it was understandable, but a little unnecessary. Whether you trust Purito or not is entirely down to you, but personally I believe that, since it was the factories ineffectively testing the sunscreens, Purito most likely weren’t to know. Since it surfaced, the majority of brands made public apologies and rigorous efforts to re-test and reformulate their sunscreens. In light of this, I personally still choose to trust them.
Now let’s get into the Purito Soft Touch SPF itself. We know it offers SPF50, uses new generation chemical filters and is designed to be matte.
I’ve personally seen a few comments saying that it wasn’t matte whatsoever, whilst I can see where this is coming from, I do believe it’s a matte sunscreen – it just takes time to dry down.
Initially it offers a very gentle dewy finish (which I love), but after around two hours I felt like my skin ‘drunk’ it all up and left me looking much more matte than I’d like. For this reason, I would say it could work well for oily skin, since I have dry-combination skin and it was too matte for my liking.
Lastly, I felt that makeup went over the top nicely in the morning, but as it dried down I began to look drier than I wanted to. Again, it might be ideal for oilier skins for this exact reason.
I am pretty pale, so am not the best person to comment on white cast in most cases, but I would say that I don’t believe it does cause a white cast. The consistency is very much like a moisturiser, and it entirely disappeared into my skin tone. I have experienced white casts before, believe it or not, and to the best of my ability I don’t believe this has one.
The biggest concern for me with SPFs is whether or not it’s going to break me out, and unfortunately I am in the ‘every single sunscreen under the sun breaks me out’ camp. Love that for me!
If that’s you, then you may be disappointed to know that, after a couple weeks of slightly worse skin than usual, I slowly began to succumb to the fact that this sunscreen was breaking me out. Even after patch testing it for over a month, it was the consistent use across my whole face that revealed the subtle breakouts it was causing.
I’m not going to bother trying to isolate a specific ingredient – that is often a fruitless task, and if you are someone who relies on that as a method, I’d encourage you to read our post on whether skincare ingredient checker websites are accurate.
You might be surprised to find that, even though it personally broke me out, I would still recommend it. Why? Because literally everything breaks me out, and that proves to me that skin is just so unique that we cannot veto things simply because our skin didn’t like something. Couple that with the Purito Soft Touch’s ingredient profile – it could be someone’s holy grail SPF. With no fragrance, a simple ingredients list, matte finish and skin-loving ceramides, I would still recommend giving it a go.