Fake Beauty of Joseon Sunscreen on Amazon and Korea's New Council

Fake Beauty of Joseon sunscreen was sold on Amazon and TikTok Shop, and South Korea's Ministry of SMEs and Startups and its Intellectual Property Office set a launch meeting for October 2 for a joint council to deal with counterfeits of Korean brands. Seoul Economic Daily says the fakes "replicated not only the exterior design but also the seal sticker on the container opening." The brand's owner is Goodai Global.

What the council does

The council's members are the two ministries plus the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency and the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency. The launch meeting was set for the Daejeon Government Complex. The Korean-language report in Herald Economy adds the machinery behind it: the SMEs agency runs 22 global business centers in 14 countries, and the IP protection agency runs 10 overseas IP centers that support 40 countries. The plan is to share information on trademark squatting and counterfeit distribution, and to attach IP protection to the export support a company already receives.

That makes it a coordination body. Neither article I opened gives a number of listings removed, a deadline, or a seller that was named. A ministry official, Shim Jae-yoon, is quoted saying that counterfeiting "goes beyond economic losses to damage corporate and brand images." Neither mentions Amazon or TikTok taking part in the council.

A bust that happened inside Korea

The hard enforcement numbers come from a different case, announced two weeks earlier. On September 17 the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and the Intellectual Property Office announced they had caught a broker, identified only as "A," who sold Chinese-made fakes as genuine on Korean marketplaces. According to Financial News, from October 2024 to November 2025 the broker sold 61 kinds of fake cosmetics and health supplements, worth KRW 4.5 billion and about 83,000 units. Stock seized in storage came to 87 kinds, KRW 1.3 billion, about 14,000 units. The 28 kinds of cosmetics copied included items from Kahi, Beauty of Joseon and Estée Lauder.

The tip-off concerned Coupang, Naver and similar marketplaces; Amazon is not part of this case. The tests found that "미백·주름개선 등 핵심 기능성 성분과 지표 물질이 전혀 검출되지 않았다", meaning the core functional ingredients, such as whitening and wrinkle-care actives, and their marker compounds were not detected at all. The Korea Herald reports that officials found the labels, containers, sizes, colors and textures differed from the genuine items.

The Herald's English version says the haul "included 61 products" worth KRW 4.5 billion and leaves out the 83,000 units and the 87 seized kinds. For the scale, the Korean figures above are the fuller ones.

The articles I read do not say which of the 28 brands' items were tested for which ingredient, so whether a fake sunscreen had UV filters in it is not answered.

Amazon is on the brand's own list

Beauty of Joseon's authorized online retailers page lists Amazon and TikTok Shop under the US, with the Amazon entry linking to amazon.com/beautyofjoseon. The page I opened names no seller account and has no counterfeit warning or way to check a unit. A listing on Amazon alone therefore says little about whether the tube is real, and the seller account matters more.

A Korean-American buyer in Suwanee, Georgia bought a popular Korean sunscreen on Amazon at a steep discount from a third-party seller, according to Korea Daily. She noticed "noticeable packaging differences and an unusual lotion texture," reported it to Amazon and "received a refund." Korea Daily does not name the brand in that story, so it is not evidence about Beauty of Joseon specifically.

What the same sunscreen looks like when it is fake is better documented. KED Global quoted a TikTok user in June 2025 about a fake Beauty of Joseon tube bought on Amazon: the seal sticker design was identical to the original, and apart from "slightly bolder lettering and a more plastic-like tube texture," it was "nearly impossible to tell the difference."

The listing is where the fakes were easier to catch. A 2023 post on the IP blog ipfever described fake listings that wrote the brand as "Beauty of Jose a n" or "Joseon Korean sunscreen," and one that wrote the Korean name as "조ㄴII녀" so that it resembled 조선미녀 without matching it. The post dates from July 2023.

If you have already ordered one

This part is my own reading, and none of the reports above states it. Price is not a safe signal: the Herald says the fake Relief Sun was priced close to the genuine one to avoid suspicion. Check whether the seller is a third party before you order, and compare the seller's name with the storefront the brand links to.

Korean authorities' advice, as the Herald relays it, is to buy only through websites certified by the brand or manufacturer when shopping on open marketplaces, and to contact customer service when in doubt. Korea Daily says the Intellectual Property Office runs a fake K-brand report center at ip-navi.or.kr/kbrands/angel.do, which passes reports to the company concerned and assists with administrative or criminal action where local trademark rights apply. The page is in Korean and framed as a reporting event with coupon rewards, and sign-up is through a social media account.

The Georgia buyer's refund came through Amazon's own report route, and that is the step most readers can take today.

If you bought Relief Sun on Amazon this year, was the seller listed as the brand's own storefront or as a third party?

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