Tony Moly Egg Pore Silky Smooth Balm Review

During one of my recent Beautynetkorea.com hauls, I was given some samples of Tony Moly products and liked them all so much that the next time I went to place an order, I looked to see what else Tony Moly had to offer.  I couldn't resist the Egg Pore Silky Smooth Balm ($10.80) for two reasons- One, I love primers and two, the packaging is just too darn cute! 

If you're not familiar with Tony Moly products, they're one of Korea's hottest brands and their main focus is to perfect the skin using the latest technologies and advances.

Claims/Ingredients:
This balm is essentially a pore-smoothing primer that actually contains a slew of good-for-the-skin ingredients. In fact, this has more anti-aging ingredients in it than my night cream! That's what I love about Korean skincare products...they're packed with mostly active ingredients rather than fillers, and the prices are way below what we would pay here for a product of the same caliber.
This contains silicones first and foremost, as most primers do, but after that, it has Retinol, Vitamin C, Collagen, Hyaluronic Acid, Copper, 3 different Peptides, Panthenol, Niacinamide (main ingredient in Olay products), and various floral and herbal extracts. Whew!  Like I said, I've never owned a night cream that had that many skin-perfecting ingredients in it all together.  Most of them have a couple at best.

Packaging: 
I had no idea when I purchased this that it had so many amazing ingredients...what initially drew me to this was the packaging.  It's shaped like an egg, and it's pretty large (read: not easy to travel with) and it's much bigger than a real egg.

The packaging is a bit deceiving because all of the product is in the bottom third of the egg and the rest is just wasted packaging.  At first, I was pretty bummed because I thought that the entire egg would be filled with product.  But you really only need a tiny bit of this primer for each use, so what you get will actually last a really long time, and it's actually no smaller than any other jar of primer that's on the market.

This balm has a stiff, whipped egg white consistency at first but it just melts right into your skin so easily.

This primer is thicker than a lot of the gel formulas.  The texture reminds me of the L'Oreal Studio Secrets primer (the pink one in the jar).  It gives the skin a really velvety feel and my dry skin loves this because it feels moisturizing.  This is marketed to control oil and sebum, but since my skin is pretty much devoid of any oil, I'm not able to say if it works well for that or not.
As a primer, it gives a nice, smooth canvas to apply makeup on and it also gives my skin a blurry effect and fills in pores nicely.

I haven't been using this long enough to see any effects from the anti-aging ingredients, but I'm going to keep using this and keep you updated if it improves my skin over time.

Overall, this primer has it all and at a great price!  Tony Moly is now sold at Urban Outfitters, and they're charging $16 for this product there.  I don't have an Urban Outfitters near me and would need to order it online anyway, so I ordered it from BeautyNetKorea because it's only $10.80 there (since it's coming directly from Korea) and they always include a bunch of free samples of other products to try.
On a side note, Sephora has started selling a couple of Tony Moly products!  Just lip balms for now, but I wonder if the whole line will be coming soon?  I'm so happy that more and more Korean brands are coming to the US.