Moisturiser · Anua

Anua PDRN cream: the numbers are on the box, not the tube

By Sunny Park · Updated September 11, 2026 · Three weeks of daily use

Heads up: some links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. I bought this cream with my own money, and my honest opinion is never for sale.

I did not buy this because of the ingredient list

I bought it because my face started tightening.

Through the summer I was using a light gel-type moisturiser and it was fine. Then the season turned — cooler air, drier air — and within about a week my cheeks were tight and flaking at the edges. My cheeks are dry and my T-zone is oily, which is the most common combination there is, and the light cream had been doing enough for the oily half and nothing at all for the dry half.

Three weeks on this one and my cheeks have not tightened once. That is the whole review in a sentence. Everything below is what the label adds to it.

Throw the box away and the numbers are gone forever

This is the part I did not expect.

Korean cosmetics rules make a brand print a concentration when the ingredient is named in the product name. This product is called PDRN Hyaluronic Acid 100, so the figures have to exist somewhere. They do — on the back of the carton, in small type.

The tube itself carries no ingredient list at all. Not a short one, not a partial one. It has the name, the volume, how to use it, a caution line, the manufacturer and two web addresses. That is it.

So the moment the carton goes in the bin, 1,000ppm and 600ppm and seven figures in ppb go with it, and you are holding a tube that says 100+ and nothing else. Most people bin the box the day it arrives.

One line exists in Korean and not in English

Here is the thing you can only see if you read both halves of the same panel.

The English reads ANUA PDRN HYALURONIC ACID 100 MOISTURIZING CREAM. Directly under it, the Korean reads the same name and then adds, in brackets:

미뷣 / 주름개선 기능성 화장품
brightening / wrinkle-improvement functional cosmetic

That is not marketing copy. In Korea it is a regulated category: a brand that wants to claim brightening or wrinkle improvement has to file for it, using an ingredient the regulator has approved for that claim, at the level set for it. The back of the box repeats the claim in the efficacy box.

The English side says nothing about it. Not because anyone is hiding it — because there is nothing to translate it into. The United States has no equivalent category. A cream that has cleared a government filing in one country arrives in another as a cream.

Two ingredients in this list are the ones Korea recognises for those two claims: niacinamide and adenosine. Both appear on the box. Neither has a number next to it, because neither is in the product name.

What the box actually prints

Start with the one everyone is buying. PDRN is sodium DNA, at 1,000ppm — 0.1%. The box does not leave you to work that out; there is a footnote directly under the list that says so outright.

That footnote matters more than it looks. No ingredient list anywhere in the world contains an ingredient called PDRN. It appears as sodium DNA, or hydrolysed DNA, or something plant-derived. The word only lives on the front of the box. So when you see two PDRN products with two different figures, you may be looking at two different substances, and lining the numbers up as a ranking is a mistake. I have made it.

Ten hyaluronic acids, and seven of them are rounding errors

The product is called Hyaluronic Acid 100 and the list carries ten different forms of it. Three of them are printed in ppm. The other seven are printed in ppb.

One ppm is a thousand ppb. So:

All seven of the ppb ingredients together come to 3.25ppm, against 1,000ppm for the three above them. They are three tenths of one percent of the hyaluronic acid in the tube.

Say the honest thing about that: those seven are there so the marketing can say ten types. That is what a ppb figure on a cosmetic label usually means.

Now say the other honest thing, because it is the one that actually helps you. The three real figures are ordinary and fine. Hyaluronic acid is not an ingredient where more is better — past a point it turns a cream tacky, and in genuinely dry air a humectant with nothing over the top of it can leave your face worse than it found it. 1,000ppm of working hyaluronic acid in a cream this rich is a sensible formula, not a thin one.

The ingredient doing most of the work has no number at all

Read the first four ingredients in order:

Water. Squalane. Glycerin. Niacinamide.

Squalane is second. Not twentieth, not buried at the end with the preservatives — second, ahead of glycerin.

That single line explains the whole product better than anything on the front of the box. Hyaluronic acid pulls water toward your skin. Squalane is the layer that stops the water leaving again. In a heated room the second job is the one that matters, and it is the job my old light cream was not doing.

It has no figure next to it, because squalane is not in the product name, so nobody had to print one. The most important ingredient in this cream is the one Korean law did not require a number for. That is worth knowing before you judge any Korean product by the figures alone.

One more thing from the list: there is no fragrance and no parfum anywhere in it. Not lower down, not under another name. I cannot smell anything when I use it either.

What it feels like

It is thick. It comes out of a narrow nozzle in a rope that keeps its shape rather than spreading on its own, and you can see that in the photo above without me having to describe it.

Rubbed in, it is not greasy and it is not shiny. What it leaves is best described as a light coating — you can feel that something is there, in the way you can feel a lip balm. On my dry cheeks that feeling is the reason it works. On my T-zone I do not want it yet.

Use it by zone, not by face

This is the part almost nobody outside Korea is told, and it is the difference between this cream working for you and sitting in a drawer.

A moisturiser does not have to go everywhere. If your cheeks are dry and your T-zone is oily — and most people reading this are exactly that — then put this on the dry half and leave the oily half alone. Cheeks, around the mouth, anywhere that flakes. Skip the nose and forehead until the heating has been running for a month and they need it too.

Who this is for, and it is not about the season

I keep seeing Korean creams sold abroad as winter products, and for a lot of you that is the wrong instruction. Rooms dry your face out, not months.

Forced-air heating pushes indoor humidity down through the winter in most of the US and Canada — that is why your face tightens in January even though you are only outside for ten minutes a day. Office air conditioning does the same thing in August in Texas and Florida. And if you live somewhere high and dry, Denver or Salt Lake or Phoenix, the air is like that all year and there is no season to wait for.

If you are in the right-hand column today, you are not necessarily in it in three months. That is a timing answer, not a no.

The 100-hour claim, and what is behind it

The side of the box carries two circles: 100H for a hundred hours of moisture retention, and 100% for satisfaction with radiance and hydration after use. Both have footnotes, and the footnotes are the interesting part.

The test was run at a Korean dermatological research institute on 22 adult women aged 21 to 67, between 12 and 16 December 2024. The 100% figure is the share of those participants who answered yes or strongly yes on a questionnaire.

Nothing there is dishonest — Anua printed the conditions, which plenty of brands do not. But you should read the number with its conditions attached. Twenty-two people over four days is a small, short study, and a satisfaction survey measures what people said, not what an instrument measured. A hundred hours is a real claim about moisture retention in a lab. It is not a promise that your face stays hydrated for four days.

My verdict

Will buy again. No fragrance in the list. Has not broken out my T-zone in three weeks, and my T-zone is where I break out when something does not suit me.

I cannot tell you anything about the brightening or the wrinkle claims. Three weeks is not enough to see either, and anyone who tells you otherwise after three weeks is guessing. What I can tell you is the thing I bought it for: the tightening stopped, and it has stayed stopped.

The set I have is 60ml plus a 30ml tube, so I am nowhere near the end of it. That is the only reason this is not stamped bought again.

Two things before you click. The listing photos usually show the tube, and the tube has no numbers on it — if you want the figures you want a listing that shows the carton. And the set size varies; mine is the 60ml + 30ml Korean set.