Decoded Korea

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...