Decoded Korea

Until August 2025, Korean chemical law kept a single list of toxic substances. A mixture became a toxic substance once a listed ingredient passed a set concentration, and that concentration was low enough to catch everyday products. Under the old rules, a mixture containing 0.1 percent benzene counted as toxic, which put gasoline, at roughly 0.7 percent benzene, under the same controls as far more dangerous materials. On August 7, 2025, the revised Act on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemicals (K-REACH) replaced that single category with three hazard categories, each with its own concentration threshold for mixtures. We counted every designation in the current public data to see where the substances ended up. What the three categories mean Human acute hazard covers substances that can harm health after a single or short exposure. Human chronic hazard covers harm from repeated exposure, or harm that shows up after a latency period. Ecological hazard covers harm to aquatic or...

Exosome masks appear in Grazia's roundup of 2026 K-beauty trends, next to PDRN serums. In Korea, a culture medium made from human stem cells can go into a cosmetic if it meets a national safety standard. Ship the same product to the EU, ASEAN or China and the answer changes, because of where the ingredient came from rather than what it is called. This post compares how ten markets treat cosmetic ingredients of human origin, using MFDS public data, the Korean and Taiwanese rule texts, and the EU regulation. Korea bans human cells, with one exception Annex 1 of Korea's Regulation on Safety Standards for Cosmetics, the list of ingredients that may not be used, includes human cells, tissues and their culture media. The same line carries an exception: culture media that meet the safety standard for human cell and tissue culture media in Annex 3 are excluded. The current text is MFDS Notice No. 2026-19, in force since March 18, 2026. Annex 3 sets out what that standard requir...

One of the skin experts Grazia interviewed for its 2026 K-beauty trend piece called 2025 the year of PDRN and expects 2026 to belong to EGF, epidermal growth factor, which is getting attention in Korea as a skin-repair ingredient. On an ingredient list, EGF goes by its INCI name: rh-Oligopeptide-1, sh-Oligopeptide-1, or a longer name built on one of those. In the EU ingredient database, the two letters in front of the name lead to different records. China does not allow the substance under any of these names, through a rule that its ban list does not show. rh, sh, and no prefix rh-Oligopeptide-1 and sh-Oligopeptide-1 both describe recombinant human EGF, a protein of 53 amino acids made by microorganisms that carry the human EGF gene. The EU ingredient database, CosIng, separates them by where that gene came from. For rh-Oligopeptide-1, the starting gene was isolated directly from a human cell. For sh-Oligopeptide-1, the starting gene was synthesized to be identical to the human o...

A CAS registry number looks like the most reliable identifier a compliance team has. Names vary by language, by supplier and by decade. The number does not. So a common shortcut in regulatory checks is to take an ingredient's CAS number and look up every restriction filed against it. We checked how well that shortcut holds up across our database of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients. It holds up less often than the number's reputation suggests, and when it fails, it fails in a consistent direction. How many ingredients share a number Only 8,403 of the 21,796 ingredients carry a CAS number at all. The other 61 percent have none, so a CAS-based check cannot see them. Among the ingredients that do carry one, there are 7,419 distinct CAS numbers. Of those, 710 are listed against more than one ingredient, and 2,730 ingredients carry at least one shared number. Ingredients sharing one CAS number CAS numbers 2 369 3 109 4 56 5 49 6 to 10 79 11 or more 48 The largest si...

Walk through the fragrance aisle of a beauty store and the word natural does most of the selling. Essential oils, botanical extracts, plant-derived aromatics. The implied contrast is with synthetic fragrance, which appears on ingredient lists as the single word "parfum" and carries a reputation to match. We checked whether regulators treat the two categories differently. Our database holds 21,796 cosmetic ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets. Of those ingredients, 1,517 are listed with a fragrance function. We sorted them by whether our records define them as plant-derived or as a chemical structure, and compared what regulators did to each group. The answer has two halves that point in opposite directions. Fragrance is a heavily regulated category The group as a whole is worth a number first. Population Ingredients Carrying a regulatory designation Rate Fragrance functions 1,517 305 20.11% All ingredients 21,796 1,486 6.82% Fragran...

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...