Bounce Up Pacts and Pore Putty: Chosungah22, Ver 88, Stila, Peter Thomas Roth: Do They Work?

One of the trending things in the beauty scene now, particularly the Asian beauty scene, is Bounce Up Pacts, as they are called by Asian brands, or Pore Putty as they are called by Western brands. For those who may not have heard, this is basically a base makeup, akin to foundation, and functions quite similarly, in that it comes in a variety of skin-like shades, and is meant to provide coverage and a smooth finish to the skin.

Bounce Up Pact, Pore Putty: New and trending here!

What's different and new about these Bounce Up Pacts/Pore Putties, though, is the texture. These have a hybrid texture that's sort of similar to a dough, or Play-Doh, which you can roll up, ball around, squish, and so on. You can depress your finger into the pact, and like Play-Doh, your finger will leave a print on the surface, but you can smooth it out. So these are sort of like, not as liquid as traditional cream foundation, but not as dry as a powder, and the "Putty" or "Bounce Up" name is a reference to how malleable the products are. On Youtube, you can find all sorts of videos demonstrating the more interesting properties of this product, as you can see below.

A Play-Doh, putty-like texture gives a feeling of novelty to the product (Source)

Interestingly though, this new generation of products aren't actually the first to use the phrase "pore putty". Back in the early-to-mid-2000s, Japanse brand Sana came out with a range of products called "Pore Putty", although none of them had a malleable, dough-like texture. Rather, the range's name was indicative of the supposed claims of the products - to hide your pores - and came in a range of liquids, powders, and creams, with BB creams, mineral powders, makeup bases, concealers and so on.

I guess this Bounce Up Pact/Pore Putty thing must be pretty huge right now, because I received two real-life queries from friends about this class of product, as well as one online request via Twitter. So I figured, why not? Most of the questions I got were centred around 1) whether the Bounce Up Pacts/Pore Putties were really novel, new or groundbreaking, as well as 2) what are the ingredients that give the product its interesting texture? So we'll attempt to look at these two questions in this post!

hello, @musicalhouses :) would you like to do ingredients analysis to Ver. 88 Bounce-Up Pact? It has been hot item these days.

— a (@justletterA) December 14, 2015

The best way to get blogpost ideas: Reader suggestions! Thank you for the idea!
If you know my blog, you know what I'm going to say next - we're going to look at ingredients lists! It was quite hard to find the ingredients lists for some of the Asian brand Bounce Up Pacts, but after searching the internets and asking other bloggers, I managed to get the ingredients lists for 4 products: the Chosungah22 Bounce Up Pact Master, Ver 88 Bounce Up Pact SPF 50/PA+++, Stila Perfectly Poreless Putty Perfector, and the Peter Thomas Roth Pore Putty. With two "Western" Pore Putties, and two "Asian" Bounce Up Pacts, this should give us plenty of material to work with! So let's get started!
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