POWER SOLUTION SWS: The Pigment Vial, With Arbutin at a Full 2%

Every vial in the GENOSYS Power Solution range wears a three-letter code, and each code is a registered product name with a single job printed beside it. SWS is Skin Depigmenting & Whitening Solution — the one you reach for when the face in front of you is uneven. Arbutin at a full 2%, in a sealed 2 ml glass vial, ten to a box.

The concern

Pigmentation rarely arrives on its own. It comes with a tone that has stopped being even, a surface that has stopped catching light the way it used to, and patches that make-up covers rather than fixes. That is the complaint SWS is built for, and it is the only one it claims.

The vial for pigment

Korea licenses SWS as a whitening functional cosmetic and names arbutin as its principal ingredient. The carton says the result in one line: helps improve pigmentation, even skin tone and brighten the skin surface. That is the whole brief.

Arbutin at 2%

Two percent is a full working dose, not a sprinkle for the ingredient list, and every batch is tested against that declaration before it leaves Korea. Kojic acid is in there too, at 0.05%, and licorice root extract at 0.001%. Both are named because they are on the carton. Neither is the engine. Arbutin at 2% is why this vial exists.

sh-Polypeptide-7, the signature of the range

Every Power Solution vial carries it, and here it sits at 6.6 ppm. It is a single-chain recombinant human peptide grown by fermentation from a synthesised copy of the human gene that codes for somatotropin, which is what makes every batch arrive with the same 217-amino-acid sequence rather than something that varies with the harvest. Palmitoyl tripeptide-1 sits alongside it at 0.5 ppm.

One vial. One treatment.

Two millilitres, sealed in glass under a crimped cap and opened at the chair. Nothing is decanted, nothing is kept, and nothing oxidises between one face and the next. Ten vials are ten full doses. Unopened the box holds three years, with the expiry date printed on it.

5-Free

Formulated without parabens, ethanol, artificial pigment, artificial fragrance or artificial surfactant. The five exclusions are named on the box rather than implied, and they matter more here than in a cream: this is a leave-on solution going onto skin that has just been worked on.

How to use it

The carton gives four steps and no more: cleanse the face, open one vial, apply the solution, let it absorb. It is a leave-on solution, so it is not rinsed off. Keep it away from the eyes. If a practitioner has set you a protocol, follow theirs rather than ours.

Specification

Which of the six?

Match the vial to the complaint rather than to the marketing:

• SWS — pigmentation and uneven tone.
• CVS — tired, dull skin that needs reviving.
• HES — dehydrated and flat, wanting volume back.
• AWS — lines and loss of firmness.
• CTS — rough or slack texture.
• PCS — oil and breakouts.