Decoded Korea

Korea has a reputation for strict, detailed cosmetic regulation, and that reputation is mostly earned. But "strict" and "comprehensive" are not the same thing. A market can regulate an ingredient tightly while another market regulates a completely different set of ingredients that the first one leaves alone. We queried our database of 21,796 ingredients across 10 markets, looking for the gaps — ingredients that carry a regulatory entry in at least one market but none in Korea. There are 319 of them. Some are restricted in six or seven markets at once, and still absent from the Korean entries in our data. The pattern is worth understanding for anyone assuming Korean compliance is a superset of everyone else's. The headline: 319 ingredients regulated elsewhere, not in Korea's entries Of the ingredients in our database that carry a regulatory entry somewhere, 319 have one in at least one of the other nine markets but not in Korea. That does not mean these i...