Country&Stream Honey Peel Off Pack Review Or: The Peel-Off Mask From HELL.

There are so many exciting things going on right now – I am in the middle of making my apartment more homely, building myself tables and a nice area in my kitchen for lots of people to sit and chill (will definitely share pictures once finished!) and I might take on new responsibilites at work as well as a payrise! Things have been really busy, but also real good. Except for the item I NEED to review today: Nothing good will ever come out of this. It’s the devil in disguise (LITERALLY.) Please take a second to say hello to the most evil peel-off mask on the (Japanese) market: The Honey Peel Off Pack from Country & Stream.

Looks pretty harmless, no? Yeah, don’t let the cute little chubby bear fool you. Fool me once, shame on me you say. This is the devil’s child and I have no idea what the people from Country & Stream thought when formulating this spawn of evil – I absolutely loved their lip balm until I found out that it breaks me out. Duh. Guess there’s a reason to lure people in with cute chubby bears…. (just kidding – I don’t want to bash the brand. But man this is just bad.)

I bought this on one of my trips to Japan and thought well, you can’t really go wrong with honey, right? As a big honey and propolis fan, I thought this would be a nice mask once in a while to pamper myself. Turns out this thing was created to destroy my skin. But more on that later. The packaging is to die for, as expected for a product from Japan and probably the main reason why this caught my eye. If I remember correctly, this was about 800Yen and I bought it in Plaza which is one of my favorite stores to browse for new Japanese skincare products! (Sadly, I don’t know the ingredients for this as they are not printed on the tube -there was a plastic thing over the tube that I threw away a long time ago, I suspect that’s where the ingredients would have been printed- but since I am not recommending this product, why bother with ingredients! Ha!)

In comes in a little plastic tube and holds 60g of product. The instructions are pretty clear: Wash your face and make sure that it is really patted dry. Afterwards, put on a „pearl-sized“ amount of product on the areas displayed, leaving out the sensible eye and lip areas. After 15-20 minutes, peel it off and you are good to go! There is an underlined warning in the description that says you shouldn’t let it dry too long under no circumstances. Maybe that should’ve gotten me thinking but well, I’ve been always been the adventurous kind of beauty blogger. What could possibly go wrong…..? -cough cough –

When I squeezed the product out I immediately noticed how extremely sticky it is. Like, you know honey? Smooth, velvety but slightly sticky consistency? Yeah, this is nowhere near honey – I had actually the feeling of putting glue on my face, that’s how sticky this stuff is. I couldn’t even really spread it across my skin because it was so immensely sticky to begin with. Needless to say, it was already quite the challenge to get enough product out of he tube. But hey, nothing can stop my curiosity.

This is the drying process after exactly 15 minutes. I set a timer to be sure not to let it dry too much as they stressed this part on the packaging. I didn’t take a picture with my face with the product on as I didn’t know back then that I would review it – just decided afterwards that I need to warn my fellow blogger friends and readers from this evil glue.

After exactly 15 minutes, I tried to peel it off of my face. I had quite a thick layer on my face (because you know, this stuff refused to be spread across my skin, so.) which is why I thought it would be easy to remove (a common mistake is to layer peel-off masks on too thin as that can make it really hard to peel them off effectively.) However, it felt almost as tearing away my own skin – IT HURT SO BAD! Like, I have 16 piercings and my pain tolerance is in general quite high but damn, this took me a reaaaal long time to peel off. 

In fact, I gave up in the middle around 10-ish minutes because it hurt so bad. I think I ripped off ALL my baby hair I had in my face. All of them. Afterwards, my skin was extremely red and inflamed and hurt pretty bad – something I had never experienced with any peel-off mask before (and I had my fair share of peel-off masks in my twenties.)

It..doesn’t look so bad in this picture, but my face was fire red (I had to take the picture in front of my very bright make-up mirror because it was already 1 AM, ehem.) I didn’t put anything on my forehead, only on my cheeks and chin and that was already enough. I had to put a sheet mask in the freezer to calm down my skin as it felt extremely tight (something I never have any problems with) and I could really feel the pain and stress from peeling off the mask. 

I had to wash half of it off with warm water because it just hurt so bad.  Maybe I’m getting old, but this is definitely the counter definition of a gentle skincare product. Maybe for the hardcore enthusiasts, this might be something worth a try. To me however, I will make sure to NEVER touch this again. Nope. Thanks. Absolutely do not recommend this mask at all. Even worse, I didn’t notice any difference at all (despite redness and very sad skin). Sure, my face was soft but I think that was more the case because this evil glue ripped off all the facial hair I once had. RIP facial hair.

Has anyone else tried this product…? Did I buy a faulty product maybe..? Whatever the case, I will make sure to never touch this thing again, not even with gloves. Learned my lesson. Did you ever try a product that just didn’t work at all for you? Please take everything in this review with a grain of salt as many people react very differently to different products 🙂

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this review! If you have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comments. Have a great weekend everyone 🙂

Lots of love,