The short answer
Yes, with the expectation set correctly. Pores don't close. Nothing closes pores. What these do is smooth the texture around your nose, and they do that well enough that I've rebought them.
$33 for 70 pads is about $0.47 each, or roughly 23 weeks at three nights a week. That's the cheapest per-use thing in this whole category.
Dual-textured pads: a rougher side for the T-zone, a smooth side for everywhere else. You wipe, you wait, you carry on. There is no ritual to it, which after a while is the point.
They sit at 4.7 / 5 on Amazon Australia, the highest rating of anything on the beauty page, and that's with a lot of reviewers who clearly expected pore-closing miracles.
What they actually do
Chemical exfoliation with a bit of physical texture, in a format that removes every excuse not to do it. That last part is most of the value. A serum you have to think about gets used twice; a pad you grab gets used.
The texture around the nose and on the chin genuinely smooths out over a few weeks. Blackheads look less obvious because the surface around them is more even, not because anything has been extracted.
The thing to be honest about
Pore size is mostly genetic and nothing topical changes it. Any product promising otherwise is selling you a photograph taken under different lighting.
What changes is how visible pores are, which depends on the texture and oil around them. That's a real improvement and it is worth $33. It is not the improvement the category name implies, and the gap between those two things is where most disappointment with K-beauty comes from.
Also: these are exfoliating. If you're already using an acid, using both is how you end up with a stinging face — the same trap the six-step routine sets. Pick one.
The cost, properly
70 pads at $33 is $0.47 a pad. At three nights a week a tub lasts about 23 weeks, so call it $74.61 a year.
For comparison, the BIODANCE Bio-Collagen Deep Mask (4ct) on the same page is $24.95 for four sheets — $6.24 each. Both are good. Only one of them is something you can use routinely without thinking about the cost.
Who should skip them
- Dry or reactive skin. Three nights a week will be too much. Start at one, or don't.
- Anyone already on a retinoid or an acid. You're exfoliating already. Adding these is not additive, it's just more.
- Anyone expecting pores to disappear. Covered above, and worth repeating, because it's the only reason people give these a bad review.
Would I buy them again
Already have. They're the rare thing that's cheap per use, easy enough to actually keep doing, and honest about what it is once you get past the product name.
The rest of the K-beauty picks, with today's prices, are on the beauty page.