Decoded Korea

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What's Inside the K-REACH Chemical Substance API: 5 Queries for Compliance Workflows

If you handle chemical compliance for products entering Korea, the question is rarely "is this chemical dangerous." It is "how does Korea classify it, is it registered, and does it carry a GHS label requirement." Those answers live in K-REACH — Korea's Act on Registration and Evaluation of Chemical Substances — and in the GHS classifications maintained alongside it. The K-REACH Chemical Substance API exposes 47,517 registered substances, each with nine regulatory flags, plus GHS hazard data, through a single JSON interface. Like our cosmetics API, the data is Korean in origin, but the fields a chemical compliance workflow uses — CAS number, English name, the hazard flags, GHS pictogram codes, UN numbers — come back in English or in international standard form. A non-Korean-speaking analyst can run the whole thing. This post walks through five real queries and what each one answers. The nine flags Every substance in the database carries nine boolean regulato...

What's Inside the K-Beauty Cosmetic Ingredients API: 4 Queries That Show You the Data

Korean cosmetic regulatory data is hard to work with for three reasons. It is written in Korean. It is spread across two government agencies — MFDS for the rules and KCIA for the ingredient classifications. And what looks like a single restriction on paper is often three different texts in three different formats: a Korean notice, an English-translated CosIng entry, and a provisional KCIA clause. The K-Beauty Cosmetic Ingredients API is the version of that data we wish we had had when we started. It exposes 21,796 ingredients with their regulatory status across 10 markets — the EU, Korea, ASEAN, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and the US — through a single, consistent JSON interface. The Korean source text is preserved in the payload, but the fields most regulatory workflows depend on come back in English or numeric form. The 19 posts we have published on this blog are all built on this same database, in English. This post walks through what the API actually returns,...

We Counted Cosmetic Restrictions in 10 Countries. The EU Has 5,301. The US Has 111.

Every few months, a post goes viral claiming that Europe bans more than a thousand cosmetic ingredients while the US bans barely a dozen. The numbers are usually right, but they compare only two markets. We wanted the full picture, so we counted the ingredient restrictions in all 10 markets our database covers. The gap is wider than the usual comparison suggests. The EU accounts for 5,301 ingredient restrictions in our data. The US has 111. The eight markets in between fall into a pattern that says more about regulatory philosophy than about safety. The ranking Each number below counts how many cosmetic ingredient restrictions — prohibitions plus concentration limits — each market has in our regulatory database. Rank Market Total Prohibited Restricted 1 EU 5,301 4,039 1,262 2 ASEAN 4,843 3,891 952 3 China 4,145 3,373 772 4 Korea 4,046 3,356 690 5 Brazil 4,022 3,220 802 5 Argentina 4,022 3,220 802 7 Taiwan 2,137 1,459 678 8 Canada 1,947 1,699 248 9 Japan 386 95 ...

The EU Is Moving to Restrict 10,000 PFAS. Korea Has Flagged 18 of Its 147.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the "forever chemicals" — are the target of the largest chemical restriction in EU history. A proposal to limit more than 10,000 of them at once is moving through the EU system, with a decision expected in 2026. Several US states have already banned them from cosmetics, textiles, and furniture. Korea's chemical database, K-REACH, registers 147 PFAS. None carry the "prohibited" flag. Eighteen are classified as persistent organic pollutants. The rest — about 129 — are registered with no hazard classification at all. What PFAS are PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals built around carbon-fluorine bonds, among the strongest in chemistry. That bond is why they resist heat, water, and oil, and why they are used in non-stick coatings, waterproof fabrics, food packaging, and firefighting foam. It is also why they do not break down — they persist in water, soil, and human blood for years. Hence "forever chemicals....

The EU Capped Retinol in 2024. Retinal, Bakuchiol, and 20+ Other Retinoids Still Have No Limit.

Retinal serums sell at 0.05%, 0.1%, and 0.2%. Bakuchiol is marketed as a plant-based retinol alternative. Granactive Retinoid appears on ingredient lists as hydroxypinacolone retinoate. All are vitamin A derivatives or stand-ins, all are sold as retinol's gentler or stronger relatives, and none has a concentration limit in any of the 10 countries we track. In an earlier post, we covered how the EU set the first hard limits on retinol in 2024. This time we checked every other retinoid in our database to see which ones those limits actually reached. Of the 26 retinoid compounds we track, only three are restricted anywhere — retinol, retinyl acetate, and retinyl palmitate. The other 23, including retinal, which is more potent than retinol, carry no concentration limit in any market we cover. Why retinal is the stronger one Every vitamin A derivative has to convert to retinoic acid before skin can use it. The number of conversion steps sets both potency and irritation. Retinyl est...

30 Active Cosmetic Recalls in Korea. 18 of Them Came From 4 Companies.

When a cosmetic product is found to violate Korean cosmetic regulations, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) can order it off shelves. Every recall order ends up in a public registry, available through the government's open-data portal. We pulled the full registry through data.go.kr and read every case. It contains 30 active recall orders, and 18 of them came from just four companies. The count is small partly because of how the registry works. Each recall order stays visible for three years from the order date, so what we see is a rolling window rather than a lifetime tally. The earliest case dates to June 2023. The most recent is February 2026. Comparing 30 to other countries is tricky. EU RAPEX, for instance, lists products in market-surveillance categories that overlap with but do not match Korea's recall criteria. Four companies, 18 of 30 cases Four manufacturers account for more than half the registry: One OEM wet-wipe maker had eight separate wet-wipe pro...