Anua Heartleaf 77 Soothing Toner vs Round Lab 1025 Dokdo Toner

How they differ

Both toners occupy the same slot and share the same brief: fragrance-free, alcohol-free, built to put water back after cleansing. What separates them is what each formula is built around.

Anua’s toner is built around one ingredient held at a high dose. Houttuynia cordata — heartleaf — is the first thing on the list at 77%, taking the spot water usually holds, and it’s there to calm. The evidence for it is early, drawn from the lab and not yet from people. A 2018 review in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology pulls together the in-vitro and animal studies on the plant; it credits compounds like quercitrin and afzelin with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity in those models, and points to human clinical studies as work still to come. Read that way, heartleaf earns its place as a soother with a plausible mechanism, and at 77% it makes up the bulk of what’s in the bottle. Behind it sits a long run of other botanical extracts — purslane, sugarcane and more — chosen for the same calming story.

Round Lab goes the other way: fewer ingredients, none of them loud. The Dokdo toner’s list runs to around sixteen items, built on deep-sea water the brand draws from the East Sea near Ulleungdo, with glycerin and betaine for hydration and panthenol and allantoin doing the settling. The deep-sea-water part is mostly marketing — as a skincare ingredient it’s a mineral-rich water and little more. What you feel comes from the humectants, and panthenol is the one with the best backing. In a seven-day, randomized, double-blind trial in Arzneimittelforschung, skin treated with topical dexpanthenol — panthenol’s cosmetic form — held more water in its outer layer and lost less of it through the surface than skin given the placebo. That trial used an ointment base, so read it as evidence for the ingredient itself; this bottle is a watery toner. The Dokdo does one thing beyond hydrate: it carries a protease enzyme — Round Lab’s patented Hatching EX-07 — that loosens dead surface cells for a light exfoliation, gentler than the acids that can sting reactive skin. It’s a mild effect — think gentle smoothing, well short of a resurfacing treatment.

One thing worth saying plainly: Anua’s toner carries panthenol too, so the split isn’t that one hydrates and the other doesn’t. It’s that Round Lab strips the formula back to the barrier basics and stops, while Anua stacks a high-dose calming botanical on top. That sets up the one real trade-off between them. Anua’s heartleaf is built to calm redness a plain formula won’t target — but its long list of plant extracts gives very reactive skin more to potentially react to. Round Lab’s restraint is the mirror image: nothing in it is aimed squarely at redness, and little in it is likely to trigger a reaction either.

Who each one suits

Reach for the Anua if redness is the thing you notice: skin that flushes after cleansing, exercise, wind or a hot room and stays pink longer than you’d like. A 77% heartleaf toner is built to settle exactly that, and it lays down a light, cooling layer of hydration while it does. The one caution is that length — it’s a long list of botanical extracts, so if your skin reacts to plant ingredients, patch-test before you commit. It calms and hydrates, but it won’t resurface texture or fade a mark — that’s a job for a treatment step.

Choose the Round Lab if what you want is a gentle, low-drama toner: dehydrated or tight skin, fragrance-sensitive skin, or a pared-back routine where the main job is to put water back. The short list is a big part of the appeal — fewer ingredients means fewer things that can sting — which also makes it an easy first toner if you’re new to this and don’t want to gamble. It hydrates and steadies the barrier, and the mild enzyme adds a little gentle smoothing on top; what it won’t do is the deeper work of an acid or a vitamin active, so if you’re layering a retinoid and want a fully inert toner, know that the enzyme is there.

Can you use both?

You can, but there’s little reason to. These aren’t complementary the way a hydrator and a treatment are — they’re two versions of the same step, both fragrance-free daily toners built on overlapping humectants, so layering them just means twice the toner doing one job. If you already own both, split them by day: the Anua when your skin is hot or flushed and wants calming, the Round Lab when it’s dry and you want the plainest rehydration. Most people are better served picking the one that matches their skin and keeping a single toner in rotation.

The answer

Buy the Anua Heartleaf 77 if your skin runs red and reactive and you want a toner that works on calming it — with the caveat that its long botanical list is worth a patch test first. Buy the Round Lab Dokdo if you want a gentle, low-irritation hydrating step that also lightly smooths through a mild enzyme, especially on dry or fragrance-sensitive skin. Both are gentle, fragrance-free and hard to regret; the only question is whether you want your toner to work on redness, or to keep skin hydrated and lightly smoothed without any fuss.