Korean Cosmetic Side Effect Reports: 11,882 Filed, 1,285 Counted

South Korea's food and drug ministry received 11,882 cosmetic side effect reports for 2025, analyzed 1,285 of them, and found no serious case. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) release went up on October 1, 2026, and the number most outlets led with was 43.2%: that share of the analyzed reports concerned infant and children's products.

I opened the ministry page on October 3 (KST). The page shows the title ('25년 화장품 안전성 정보 보고 사례 발표), the date and the department, but the figures sit in attached HWPX and PDF files that I did not open. Every number below comes from news coverage of those files, and I only used figures that appeared in more than one outlet: CNC News, Medical News and Food Today.

Which reports were counted

Parents who bought a Korean baby lotion and then saw the 43.2% headline are the readers this matters to most, so the filtering comes first.

The ministry set aside 10,597 of the 11,882 reports because they were simple complaints about fragrance, color or texture, or because the symptom was unclear. That leaves 1,285, or about 10.8% (my arithmetic). So nine in ten of the reports filed were never part of the headline analysis, and a reader who sees "11,882 adverse reactions" has the wrong picture.

Of the 1,285, infant and children's products account for 556 cases (43.2%), basic cosmetics for 475 (37.0%) and body cleansing products for 107 (8.3%). Those three add up to 1,138. The remaining 147 (about 11.5%) are spread across smaller categories; the table in Medical News lists hair dye products at 5.8%, color makeup at 2.7% and hair products at 1.8%, among others.

The symptom lists are what you would expect from a skin product. Infant products drew hives, itching, rash and a heat sensation. Basic cosmetics drew dermatitis, itching and hives. Eye irritation tied to eye-area products fell from 58 cases in 2024 to 49.

The 43.2% needs its denominator

CNC News lists the infant share by year as 27.5% in 2022, 21.5% in 2023, 32.1% in 2024 and 43.2% in 2025, and basic cosmetics as 47.7%, 54.7%, 44.5% and 37%.

The 2024 analyzed total was 1,298, against 1,285 this year. Because the pool barely moved, shares can be turned back into rough counts. 32.1% of 1,298 is about 417 infant-product reports in 2024, against 556 in 2025. For basic cosmetics, 44.5% of 1,298 is about 578, against 475. The ministry did not publish these counts. They come from rounded percentages, so read them as roughly +140 and roughly -100.

The ministry's own explanation, as quoted by CNC News and Medical News, is that infants have more sensitive skin than adults, which produces proportionally more reports, and that a larger volume of related products on the market has pushed the case count up (성인보다 피부가 민감하여 상대적으로 보고가 많은 특성과 더불어, 관련 제품의 유통량 증가가 보고 사례 증가로 이어진 것으로 분석된다).

The explanation covers the number of reports. The release as covered gives no sales or usage figure for baby products (CNC News and Food Today cite only their import value, which rose from about $15.4 million in 2022 to about $17.7 million in 2025), so the share of baby lotions that cause a reaction cannot be worked out from it. If you are choosing a baby product, this dataset cannot rank brands, and it does not try to.

What "no serious cases" does and does not tell you

The Korean wording the outlets quote is 대부분이 가려움, 피부염 등 경미한 증상이었으며 중대한 사례는 없었다. Only one of the pages I read glosses 중대한 사례 (serious case): Food Today writes 사망이나 중대한 불구 등 (death or serious disability). That is the outlet's wording, and the other pages give no definition or threshold, so the zero is the ministry's own classification of the 1,285.

Where the reports go, if you have one

The coverage names three channels: the MFDS itself, the product's responsible seller (화장품책임판매업자), and the seller of a custom-blended cosmetic. If you want compensation rather than just a record, the Korea Consumer Agency takes calls on 1372 inside Korea.

All of that assumes a purchase made in Korea. For a jar that arrived through an overseas marketplace, the release as covered does not describe a reporting route, and I did not check how each country's regulator handles reports about Korean imports.

The ministry's consumer advice, as summarized in the press note text reproduced by Dazabi, is short: do not use cosmetics on damaged skin, rinse straight away with water if a product gets into your eyes, and do not apply eyelash perm products yourself. If you have a patch of irritated skin, that first one is the line that applies to you.

The ministry's cosmetics policy division (화장품정책과) issued the release, and its contact on the page is listed by name and phone number for questions about the data.

Next year's figure will show whether the baby-product share keeps climbing from 43.2% on a pool of roughly 1,300 reports.

---

This is a running series, not a one-off post — a new post goes up every day, at around 1am Korea time.

About · Contact · Privacy Policy

Read next: How Korea Defines a Niacinamide Whitening Serum (2-5%) · Why Korean Sunscreen Isn't FDA-Approved in 2026 · "Dermatologist Tested" vs "Doctor Recommended" on Korean Labels

You might also like: How to Read the Date on Korean Food Packages After the 2023 Law Change (Korean Table)