Decoded Korea

Walk down a shampoo aisle and a good share of the bottles say sulfate-free. The phrase has been on packaging long enough that most shoppers read it as a safety claim, the way paraben-free is read. Something was taken out, and taking it out was an improvement. We checked what regulators actually say about sulfates. Our database holds 21,796 cosmetic ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets, and 280 of those ingredients have Sulfate in the INCI name. Thirty-five of them carry a regulatory entry. That is 12.5 percent, against a database-wide rate of 3.95 percent. Taken alone, that ratio says sulfates are unusually regulated. The 35 say something else. The sulfates people are avoiding Start with the ones the marketing is aimed at. These are the cleansing surfactants used in shampoo and body wash. Ingredient Regulatory entries across 10 markets Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) 0 Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES) 0 Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate 0 Ammonium Laureth Sulfat...

Chemical substance management and cosmetics regulation are separate systems in Korea. K-REACH sits with the Ministry of Environment and asks whether a substance is hazardous to handle, persistent, bioaccumulative, or requires registration above a volume threshold. The Cosmetics Act sits with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and asks whether a substance is safe on skin. We hold both datasets, 47,041 chemical substances and 21,796 cosmetic ingredients. Matching them on CAS number shows where the two systems overlap and, more usefully, where one of them is silent. The shape of the overlap Of the 41,674 K-REACH substances carrying a CAS number, 3,128 CAS values also appear in cosmetic ingredient records. That maps to 3,129 chemical substance records and 3,997 cosmetic ingredient records, the mismatch coming from cosmetic entries that list several CAS numbers and from three cases where one CAS appears against more than one substance record. Cross-tabulating by whether each syste...

An ingredient list on a cosmetic product is written under one body of law. In Korea that is the Cosmetics Act, administered by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. But many of those same substances are also registered under a second body of law, the Act on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemical Substances, known as K-REACH and administered by the Ministry of Environment. The two systems ask different questions. Cosmetics regulation asks whether a substance is safe on skin at a given concentration in a given product type. Chemical regulation asks whether a substance is hazardous to handle, whether it persists in the environment, whether a facility storing it needs an emergency plan. We hold both datasets. We matched them on CAS number to see how often the two systems land on the same substance, and how often they disagree. The overlap Of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients in our database, 8,403 carry a CAS number. Of 47,041 substances in our K-REACH database, 41,674 carry one. Ma...

Late summer is when skincare routines get heavier. The lightweight gel that worked in August gets swapped for a cream, and the ingredient list on the back of the new jar is longer and less familiar than the old one. Ceramides, squalane, petrolatum, dimethicone, urea, a few silicones with numbers in their names. Several of those names carry a bad reputation online. Petrolatum is a petroleum derivative. Silicones are said to suffocate skin. Mineral oil turns up on avoid-lists that circulate every year. None of those claims come from regulators, but they shape what people buy. So we checked what regulators actually say. We queried our database of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets, and pulled every restriction attached to the ingredients that make up a typical autumn moisturizer. Of the 26 we checked, 20 have no regulatory entry in any of the 10 markets. The six that do are mostly capped at levels above what formulators use anyway. The 20 wit...

Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury are the four heavy metals that regulators worry about most — in food, in water, in cosmetics, and in industrial chemicals. They get grouped together in headlines as "toxic heavy metals," as if they were interchangeable. In the regulatory data, they are not. Each is dangerous in its own specific way, and the way a chemical database classifies them shows the difference clearly. We queried the K-REACH database, which holds 47,517 chemical substances registered in Korea, each carrying nine regulatory flags. Searching for the compounds of these four metals returns hundreds of entries, and the pattern of flags tells you something the "toxic heavy metal" label hides: three of the four are dominated by cancer risk, and one is not. The four metals by the numbers Counting the registered compounds of each metal and their flags: Metal Compounds Toxic CMR CMR share Lead 180 159 113 63% Cadmium 107 105 65 61% Arsenic 22 22 17...