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587 Substances Restricted as Cosmetic Ingredients Carry No K-REACH Hazard Designation

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 system flags the substance:

Cosmetics restricts or prohibits Cosmetics does not
Carries a K-REACH designation9080
Carries none of the nine5872,371

The 587 in the lower-left is the group this post is about. These substances are restricted or prohibited as cosmetic ingredients, in some cases across nine of the ten markets we track, and appear on none of the nine Korean chemical designation lists.

What is in it

Sorting the 587 by how many cosmetic regulatory entries attach to each one puts two kinds of material at the top.

Colorants. The upper end of that ranking is almost entirely CI-numbered dyes and pigments.

Substance CAS Cosmetic regulatory entries K-REACH
Uranine, CI 45350518-47-826 entries across 9 marketsC.I. acid yellow 073, no designation
Eosine YS, CI 4538017372-87-121 entriesC.I. acid red 087, no designation
Naphthol Green B, CI 1002019381-50-121 entriesC.I. acid green 001, no designation
Pigment Violet 23, CI 513196358-30-120 entriesC.I. pigment violet 023, no designation
Pigment Green 7, CI 742601328-53-618 entriesC.I. pigment green 007, no designation
Deep Maroon, CI 15880:16417-83-018 entriesC.I. pigment red 063:1, no designation
Chromium Oxide Greens, CI 772881308-38-917 entriesDichromium trioxide, no designation
Sudan III, CI 2610085-86-917 entriesC.I. solvent red 023, no designation

Cosmetic colorant regulation is granular in a way chemical regulation is not. A dye gets permitted for lipstick and prohibited for eye area products, or capped at one concentration in rinse-off and another in leave-on, and each of those decisions becomes a separate regulatory entry in each market. Twenty-six entries for a single dye is normal. The chemical designation lists have no equivalent mechanism, because they are not concerned with which part of a face a substance touches.

Citrus and botanical extracts. The second cluster is natural materials, mostly citrus.

Substance CAS Cosmetic regulatory entries K-REACH
Citrus Limon Flower/Leaf/Stem Oil84929-31-739 entriesLemon, ext., no designation
Myroxylon Pereirae Resin (Balsam Peru)8007-00-925 entriesBalsams, Peru, no designation
Citrus Aurantifolia Peel Extract (Lime)90063-52-824 entriesLime, ext., no designation
Citrus Paradisi Fruit Water (Grapefruit)8016-20-416 entriesOils, grapefruit, no designation

These are prohibited or restricted in most of the 10 cosmetic markets. Our data records the restrictions but not the reasoning behind them, so we will not attribute a cause here. What the pattern does show is that whatever triggered these restrictions was visible to cosmetics regulators in eight or nine markets and did not register on any Korean chemical hazard list.

The reverse case

The opposite cell contains 80 substances: no cosmetic restriction anywhere in our data, but a K-REACH designation. The clearest examples are pH adjusters. Sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and nitric acid all appear as cosmetic ingredients with no concentration limit in any market, and all three are designated toxic and accident-preparedness substances under Korean chemical law.

The asymmetry runs both directions, and for the same underlying reason. A trace of neutralized acid in a finished toner is not a cosmetic safety question. A drum of nitric acid in a warehouse is a chemical safety question. Neither framework is failing to notice something the other caught.

We have written about that side of the overlap separately.

What a null in either column means

Not appearing on the nine lists is not the same as being unregistered. Of the 587, we find 576 present in the existing chemical inventory. They are registered substances that have not been designated toxic, restricted, prohibited, priority control, accident preparedness, persistent, registration-required, CMR or Rotterdam Convention. Inventory presence and hazard designation are different things.

Our nine flags are not the whole of Korean chemical law. The designations we track come from published lists. Facility-level obligations, volume-triggered registration duties and workplace exposure limits sit in other instruments and other datasets.

Counting is ambiguous. Cosmetic regulatory entries are counted as stored rows, and our cosmetic data contains duplicate rows where a single restriction was registered under two source ingredient codes. A substance showing 26 entries is not restricted in 26 places. For market-level counts, distinct markets are the reliable unit.

Matching is a floor. Exact CAS string comparison on both sides. Thirty-four cosmetic records carry a malformed CAS with an extra zero padded into the final segment, traceable to a source data fault; correcting them would add 17 matches. We report the uncorrected figures.

Methodology and sources

Chemical substance data comes from Korea's public data portal, covering K-REACH substance registrations and GHS classifications published by the Ministry of Environment and the National Institute of Chemical Safety. Cosmetic ingredient data comes from the Korea Cosmetic Association ingredient dictionary, with regulatory entries compiled from Ministry of Food and Drug Safety open data and EU CosIng Annexes across 10 markets.

Matching used exact CAS string comparison after splitting multi-value fields. Cosmetic records separate multiple CAS numbers with a comma and space. Chemical records use commas, slashes or ampersands inconsistently across 18 rows. No value was altered to force a match.

Figures reflect our databases as of August 2026: 47,041 chemical substances with 50,052 regulatory entries, and 21,796 cosmetic ingredients with 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets.

Regulatory data changes. Verify against the current official source before relying on any of this for a compliance decision.

For the underlying data, see K-REACH Chemical Substance and K-Beauty Cosmetic Ingredients on RapidAPI.

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