Decoded Korea

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,...