The Hunt for a Good Genes Dupe: 17 Lactic Acid Reviews

[Update 181017: Sunday Riley has admitted to having employees post fake reviews on Sephora after a whistleblower leaked an email outlining the practice to Reddit’s SkincareAddiction. Read more about the story in my post.]

Welcome to the fourth season of fanserviced-b, this is the blog’s birthday celebration! When I started the blog in April 2014, I was a kpop fangirl who had no logical place to post her beauty reviews. Since then, I’ve reviewed a ton of beauty boxes, skincare, and a little makeup, but I’m still operating without a particular goal other than looking at the evidence and telling the truth about it as best as I can. It turns out that something even as simple as that can be useful (a somewhat sad commentary on the state of mainstream beauty writing). Thank you for being here and a special shout-out to the people who knew me back when I was just fanserviced (the b is for beauty).

Each year I come up with a birthday project for the blog. This year it’s a fairly expensive and time-consuming quest: to try to find a dupe for Sunday Riley’s Good Genes. Like so many quests, it’s not the destination, but what you learn along the way that matters.

The hunt for a Good Genes dupe

At $105 per ounce, Sunday Riley’s Good Genes is just really damn expensive. The tragic thing is that it works for a lot of skin (including mine); I wish I could drag it and move along, but my skin loves it.

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Sunday Riley Good Genes Review

Lemme tell you, if I ever wrote down my life goals, “get addicted to a $105/oz. lactic acid” would not top the list.

And yet here we are.

FAK.

Let’s put Good Genes in context because late stage capitalism has a way of distorting things. When I was an undergrad student, trying to have some spending money while not taking on a job that might keep me from obsessively studying history, I sold my plasma. I’d sit there for an hour or so with a bigass needle in my arm, fiddling with a squeeze thing, trying to understand Eric Hobsbawm’s arguments about nations and nationalism. I won’t lie: it hurt. Next to me, my blood would be spun to separate the red blood cells from the plasma. The red cells would be pumped back into me along with some saline via a smaller needle within the big needle, I’d hop up slightly less confused about the origins of World War I, and I’d have $20 in cash. They had a bag of my bodily fluids. Now, if I were really on my shit, I’d go back a second time that week and get $30 (the $10 bonus was related to the plasma center not needing to duplicate tests from earlier in the week) for a bag of Tracy juice.

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SN Plant Stem Cell Moisturizer Goddess Cream Review

I’ve tested…a lot of creams over the years, but the one I keep coming back to as the absolute best, undisputed champ is SN Plant Stem Cell Moisturizer Goddess Cream, also known as SN T Cream or Yeoshin Cream in Korea. It’s a weird pick. The brand, SN (stands for Science & Nature), has slipped from the international kbeauty fan radar, for the most part, since Memebox stopped carrying this cream last year.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have fans. The cream has 476 ratings with an average review of 4.1 out of 5 on the Hwahae ingredient and product app that caters to Korean skincare enthusiasts (anything 4.0 and over with lots of reviews tends to have a good shot of being awesome, I’ve found). The Memebox product page for this cream features a number of reviews that beg the company to restock this cream.

I first tried it in 2014, selected it as one of my picks for a curated sale the same year, and have been buying it over and over again due to its awesomeness. From the nasty heat of NYC in summer to whipping winds of winter, this is my [face] jam.

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