Monthly Archives: July 2026

The Little Pot That Tells Me to Have a Great Day

Posted in beauty, Lipstick, Uncategorized by
NEOM Great Day Wonder Balm jar and box on marble, beside pink and cream faux peonies

It arrived in my basket by accident, next to someone else’s Christmas present. It’s turned out to be the best little treat I bought just for myself.

I found NEOM’s Great Day Wonder Balm the way I find most good things lately — completely by accident, while I was meant to be doing something else entirely. It was December, I was deep in Christmas shopping for everyone except myself, feeling frazzled in that specific pre-Christmas way, and this little pot ended up in my basket. What actually stopped me was the label: Have a great day. Not “smells nice.” Not “for dry lips.” Just a small, direct instruction, sitting there in gold lettering, at a moment I badly needed one.

I’d wanted NEOM’s candles for years, and I finally got their Christmas one that year too — which, sadly, met an early end when the glass cracked and I had to throw it out for safety’s sake. I was genuinely sad about that candle. But it’s this small, unglamorous pot of lip balm that’s quietly outlasted it as my actual favourite thing in the NEOM range.

It’s the last thing I put on before I start my makeup. Every single time, without fail, there’s this brief moment — maybe two seconds — where the scent hits and I actually feel lighter. It’s such a small ritual, but it works on me the same way every time, with the little pot’s instruction to have a great day.

What’s actually in the pot

Under the marketing, the balm is a proper little formula: sweet almond oil, shea butter, beeswax, castor and olive oils holding it together, and a blend of eight essential oils built around wild mint (spearmint and peppermint) and mandarin. NEOM has always been fairly serious about using genuine essential oils rather than just synthetic fragrance dressed up as aromatherapy, and you can tell — the scent doesn’t smell artificial or trying too hard. It smells fresh with a faint sweet orange blossom scent with mint and extremely moisturising.

Why it’s not just marketing

Here’s the part I found genuinely interesting when I looked into it: your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses with a direct line into the limbic system, the part of your brain handling emotion and memory. Sight, sound, and touch all get routed through a kind of relay station first. Smell doesn’t. It goes straight in. Which is a scientific way of explaining why a two-second sniff of lip balm can shift your mood before your brain has even worked out why.

The two ingredients doing the heavy lifting here both have real research behind them, not just NEOM’s word for it. Mandarin belongs to the citrus family, and citrus scents have been shown to stimulate the release of norepinephrine — a neurotransmitter tied to alertness and energy, which is a large part of why citrus scents feel so instantly “wake-up.” Peppermint has an even more specific track record: multiple studies, including work using EEG monitoring on actual drivers, have found peppermint aroma measurably increases alertness and reduces mental fatigue, alongside boosting mood and short-term memory in the process. So “wild mint and mandarin… to make you happy” isn’t just a nice sentence on a box. It’s more or less a summary of the neuroscience.

The lipstick photo

Close-up portrait wearing pink Chanel lipstick over NEOM Great Day Wonder Balm, smiling softly

The photo of me wearing lipstick is the balm doing its job, underneath a Chanel lipstick I love. It’s not a groundbreaking beauty discovery — balm under lipstick is hardly new — but there’s something about this particular pairing that makes me smile every time I catch sight of it in the mirror. Maybe it’s the mint waking me up before the day’s even started. Maybe it’s just the lovely smell. Either way, it’s earned its place as a genuine daily habit, not just a Christmas impulse buy that got lucky.

Ginseng Essence Water: An Ancient Beauty Staple in Asian Skincare

Posted in beauty, Skincare, Wellbeing by
Beauty of Joseon Ginseng Essence Water bottle and box on marble with peonies

Long before “essence” appeared on a single skincare label, it existed as a practice, not a product. Beauty waters made from fermented rice, tea leaves and root extracts were part of ancient Chinese skincare rituals, prized for softening and brightening the skin, and the tradition travelled into Korea over a thousand years ago, during the Goryeo Dynasty, where ginseng, green tea and rice water became staples of court beauty routines. Ginseng essence water, in other words, is one of the oldest beauty ideas we have. What’s changed is that we can now measure why it worked.

That history is part of why I chose Beauty of Joseon’s Ginseng Essence Water for this month’s feature. But the bigger reason is more personal. Ginseng was my mother’s root, quite literally. She never called it skincare; she called it health. She’d keep a thermos of hot water on the go, ginseng root and ginger steeped in a mug and topped up through the morning, switching over to oolong in the afternoon. It wasn’t a ritual to her, just what you did for your body as you got older. It’s taken me until my own fifties to understand that she may have been onto something the research is only now catching up to.

What the science says about ginseng essence water

Ginseng’s reputation as a general tonic is old news. What’s newer is the specific evidence on skin. A 2025 study on ginseng peptide extracts found they reduced inflammatory markers and reactive oxygen species in skin cells while measurably boosting collagen synthesis in human fibroblasts, and held up in 3D skin models exposed to UV damage, restoring barrier proteins rather than just masking damage. A separate 2026 review of five years of ginseng research describes its bioactive compounds acting on inflammation, pigmentation, barrier function and skin regeneration all at once, which is a wide net for one root to cast.

For women specifically past 50, there’s a second, less-discussed body of research worth knowing about. Multiple randomized, placebo-controlled trials have found ginseng reduces hot flashes and improves quality of life during menopause, alongside measurable gains in sexual function and wellbeing. Crucially, one review noted this happens without shifting estrogen or prolactin levels, and without any observed increase in breast cancer risk, which matters given how often women are (rightly) cautious about anything that touches hormone pathways. On the skin side specifically, fermented ginseng extracts have been shown in vitro to encourage procollagen formation while inhibiting the enzymes that break collagen down, and to reduce pigment spots, both of which are exactly the two things most of us are trying to manage by our fifties: firmness and even tone. You can read about the serum I’m using to reduce dark spots here

Why it earns a place in the routine

None of this makes ginseng essence water a miracle in a bottle, and I’d be wary of anyone who tells you it is. But it does mean the appeal isn’t just nostalgia or marketing. There’s a plausible, increasingly well-documented mechanism behind why this ingredient has stayed in beauty routines for a thousand years, and why it may matter more, not less, as skin ages. The Beauty of Joseon formula is straightforward: ginseng essence tapped in after cleansing, before the rest of the routine, doing the quiet work of feeding the skin barrier rather than sitting on top of it.

I like that my mother’s thermos of ginseng and the pink box on my bathroom shelf are, in the end, the same idea, just applied differently. She was managing something from the inside. I’m borrowing the same root to help manage it from the outside. I suspect she’d have approved of both.