Decoded Korea

In the MFDS export-market data, 535 cosmetic ingredients carry a concentration limit or condition in both Korea and the EU. For a formulator taking a Korean product to Europe, most of that overlap is uneventful: where the two maximum concentrations can be read on the same basis, they are usually identical. The differences that matter are fewer and easy to miss. Some are EU limits lower than Korea's, set for a product type or a sub-group that the Korean entry does not separate. Others are ingredients Korea still allows up to a limit and the EU has moved to its list of prohibited substances. This post sets out both, with the Korean rule text from MFDS Notice No. 2026-19 and the EU entries from CosIng and EUR-Lex. Where both markets set a limit For 258 of the 535 ingredients, each Korean maximum could be paired with an EU maximum for the same product type. In 247 of them the numbers are the same. Many of these come from shared group entries: 118 ingredients fall under the entry ...

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...

One of the skin experts Grazia interviewed for its 2026 K-beauty trend piece called 2025 the year of PDRN and expects 2026 to belong to EGF, epidermal growth factor, which is getting attention in Korea as a skin-repair ingredient. On an ingredient list, EGF goes by its INCI name: rh-Oligopeptide-1, sh-Oligopeptide-1, or a longer name built on one of those. In the EU ingredient database, the two letters in front of the name lead to different records. China does not allow the substance under any of these names, through a rule that its ban list does not show. rh, sh, and no prefix rh-Oligopeptide-1 and sh-Oligopeptide-1 both describe recombinant human EGF, a protein of 53 amino acids made by microorganisms that carry the human EGF gene. The EU ingredient database, CosIng, separates them by where that gene came from. For rh-Oligopeptide-1, the starting gene was isolated directly from a human cell. For sh-Oligopeptide-1, the starting gene was synthesized to be identical to the human o...

A CAS registry number looks like the most reliable identifier a compliance team has. Names vary by language, by supplier and by decade. The number does not. So a common shortcut in regulatory checks is to take an ingredient's CAS number and look up every restriction filed against it. We checked how well that shortcut holds up across our database of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients. It holds up less often than the number's reputation suggests, and when it fails, it fails in a consistent direction. How many ingredients share a number Only 8,403 of the 21,796 ingredients carry a CAS number at all. The other 61 percent have none, so a CAS-based check cannot see them. Among the ingredients that do carry one, there are 7,419 distinct CAS numbers. Of those, 710 are listed against more than one ingredient, and 2,730 ingredients carry at least one shared number. Ingredients sharing one CAS number CAS numbers 2 369 3 109 4 56 5 49 6 to 10 79 11 or more 48 The largest si...

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...

Late summer is when skincare routines get heavier. The lightweight gel that worked in August gets swapped for a cream, and the ingredient list on the back of the new jar is longer and less familiar than the old one. Ceramides, squalane, petrolatum, dimethicone, urea, a few silicones with numbers in their names. Several of those names carry a bad reputation online. Petrolatum is a petroleum derivative. Silicones are said to suffocate skin. Mineral oil turns up on avoid-lists that circulate every year. None of those claims come from regulators, but they shape what people buy. So we checked what regulators actually say. We queried our database of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets, and pulled every restriction attached to the ingredients that make up a typical autumn moisturizer. Of the 26 we checked, 20 have no regulatory entry in any of the 10 markets. The six that do are mostly capped at levels above what formulators use anyway. The 20 wit...

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...