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...

Summer is when your skincare is most likely to spoil. Heat and humidity accelerate the growth of bacteria, mold, and yeast in any product that contains water — a face cream opened daily in a steamy bathroom is a small ecosystem. Preservatives are what stop that. Without them, a contaminated product can cause skin or eye infections while still looking and smelling normal. So preservatives are not the villains the "preservative-free" marketing implies. They are doing necessary work, especially in the season when contamination risk peaks. But the most effective ones are also among the most regulated ingredients in cosmetics — because effectiveness against microbes and safety on human skin pull in opposite directions. We queried our database of 21,796 ingredients across 10 markets and pulled the major preservatives. The pattern is consistent: the better a preservative works, the more tightly it tends to be capped. Methylisothiazolinone: restricted in nine markets Methylisothi...

Walk down any skincare aisle and the exfoliating acids sit side by side: a 2% BHA liquid, an 8% AHA toner, a PHA serum marketed for sensitive skin. The packaging treats them as one family. Regulators do not. We queried our database of 21,796 cosmetic ingredients across 10 markets and pulled every exfoliating acid with a regulatory entry. Salicylic acid — the BHA — is restricted in 9 of the 10 markets we track. Glycolic acid, the most common AHA, carries explicit restrictions in 3. The PHAs barely register at all, with Canada as the main exception. Same shelf, same purpose, very different rulebooks. The three acid families A quick orientation for anyone outside formulation work. AHAs — glycolic, lactic, mandelic, malic, tartaric — are water-soluble acids that loosen the bonds between dead skin cells at the surface. BHA means salicylic acid in practice: oil-soluble, able to work inside pores, which is why it dominates acne products. PHAs — gluconolactone, lactobionic acid — are chemi...

If you handle chemical compliance for products entering Korea, the question is rarely "is this chemical dangerous." It is "how does Korea classify it, is it registered, and does it carry a GHS label requirement." Those answers live in K-REACH — Korea's Act on Registration and Evaluation of Chemical Substances — and in the GHS classifications maintained alongside it. The K-REACH Chemical Substance API exposes 47,517 registered substances, each with nine regulatory flags, plus GHS hazard data, through a single JSON interface. Like our cosmetics API, the data is Korean in origin, but the fields a chemical compliance workflow uses — CAS number, English name, the hazard flags, GHS pictogram codes, UN numbers — come back in English or in international standard form. A non-Korean-speaking analyst can run the whole thing. This post walks through five real queries and what each one answers. The nine flags Every substance in the database carries nine boolean regulato...

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,...

Every few months, a post goes viral claiming that Europe bans more than a thousand cosmetic ingredients while the US bans barely a dozen. The numbers are usually right, but they compare only two markets. We wanted the full picture, so we counted the ingredient restrictions in all 10 markets our database covers. The gap is wider than the usual comparison suggests. The EU accounts for 5,342 ingredient restrictions in our data. The US has 111. The eight markets in between fall into a pattern that says more about regulatory philosophy than about safety. The ranking Each number below counts how many cosmetic ingredient restrictions — prohibitions plus concentration limits — each market has in our regulatory database. Rank Market Total Prohibited Restricted 1 EU 5,342 4,039 1,262 2 ASEAN 4,886 3,891 952 3 China 4,180 3,373 772 4 Korea 4,079 3,356 690 5 Brazil 4,052 3,220 802 5 Argentina 4,052 3,220 802 7 Taiwan 2,156 1,459 678 8 Canada 1,947 1,699 248 9 Japan 386 95 ...

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the "forever chemicals" — are the target of the largest chemical restriction in EU history. A proposal to limit more than 10,000 of them at once is moving through the EU system, with a decision expected in 2026. Several US states have already banned them from cosmetics, textiles, and furniture. Korea's chemical database, K-REACH, registers 147 PFAS. None carry the "prohibited" flag. Eighteen are classified as persistent organic pollutants. The rest — about 129 — are registered with no hazard classification at all. What PFAS are PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals built around carbon-fluorine bonds, among the strongest in chemistry. That bond is why they resist heat, water, and oil, and why they are used in non-stick coatings, waterproof fabrics, food packaging, and firefighting foam. It is also why they do not break down — they persist in water, soil, and human blood for years. Hence "forever chemicals....