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Every post on Seoul Skin Notes, grouped by topic, newest first within each topic. 43 in total.

Topics: Sunscreen (10) · Labels, Rules & Safety (12) · Shopping & Prices (3) · Routines & How-To (7) · Ingredients & Evidence (10) · More (1)

Sunscreen (10)

Labels, Rules & Safety (12)

Shopping & Prices (3)

Routines & How-To (7)

Ingredients & Evidence (10)

More (1)

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Korean Water Cream Test: 10 Creams at 30 Minutes vs 4 Hours

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Korea's Consumer Agency tested ten popular water creams (수분크림, "moisture cream") sold in Korea, eight of them from Korean brands, for how much water they left in the skin, and the answer depended on when it looked. Thirty minutes after application, all ten rated "excellent" or better. Four hours after application, five were still in the top tier, three had dropped to the middle, and two sat at the bottom. One of the bottom two was the cheapest cream in the panel per millilitre. The report is 비교공감 제2020-1호, published 16 January 2020 on the government's Consumer24 portal. It is more than six years old, and I'll come back to what that means. A Korean-language search for the agency's water cream tests turned up this one report, and it has per-product numbers that English-language roundups of "best Korean moisturizers" don't carry. If you're buying a gel or water cream for the dry months and wondering whether the light, quick-absorbi...
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Serum Vials That Look Like Eye Drops: 4 Flagged in Korea

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Korean single-dose serum vials that look like eye drops were the subject of two warnings on August 4, 2026. Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) and the Korea Consumer Agency (KCA) flagged four PDRN ampoules whose containers are hard to tell apart from single-use artificial tears, and three of the four brands said they would stop making them. The sources here are the MFDS press note , a Korean PDF with eight instruction cards attached, and the Korean news reports of the KCA figures. What the Korea Consumer Agency counted The KCA went through its injury reporting system, CISS, for cases where people put something other than eye drops into their eyes by mistake. Between January 2021 and June 2026 there were 21 such cases, according to Kyunghyang Shinmun's report on the KCA findings. Four of them, or 19%, involved serums or other cosmetics. One of those four cases was reported this February. A moisturizing serum was put into an eye as artificial tears and the eye ...
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"Dermatologist Tested" vs "Doctor Recommended" on Korean Labels

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A Korean cosmetics box is allowed to print 피부과 테스트 완료, dermatologist tested. It is not allowed to print that a doctor recommends the product. Those two phrases live in two different documents, and the second one is a flat ban that the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety enforces by having sales listings blocked. If you read Korean packaging and have wondered whether "dermatologist tested" means more there than it does on a drugstore bottle in the US or the UK, the answer sits in two annexes you can open yourself. Everything below is the text as it stood when I read it on September 18, 2026 (KST). The one line in Annex 5 The ban is item 2-다 of Annex 5 to the Enforcement Rule of the Cosmetics Act , 화장품법 시행규칙 [별표 5], marked as last amended December 12, 2019. In my translation, the operative sentence says a doctor, dentist, oriental medicine doctor, pharmacist, medical institution or other party must not be presented, or hinted at, as designating, certifying, recommending, instr...
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