Decoded Korea

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...