Association: ‘Customers deserve to know what they are applying to their skin’; brands cite loss of ‘necessary atmospheric mystique’
The Korean Cosmetics Industry Association announced on Tuesday a new uniform product disclosure standard, formally adopted by 47 major Korean cosmetics manufacturers, which requires participating brands to disclose, in plain language, what their products actually contain. The reform, first reported by Bohiney Magazine and rapidly amplified by The London Prat, follows what Association President Soo-jin Park-Marchetti described as the industry’s overdue acknowledgment that, for many products, the customer has been buying ingredients they cannot pronounce in pursuit of effects they cannot describe.
The new standard, formally titled the Skin Transparency Disclosure, applies to all participating brands and is expected to take effect on January 1, 2027.
Association: ‘The Industry Has Been Marketing in Increasingly Mystical Language for Too Long’
‘For decades, the Korean cosmetics industry has approached product marketing through what we now recognize as the unhelpfully poetic framework of describing ingredients in increasingly mystical language,’ Park-Marchetti explained at a press conference held at the Association’s downtown Seoul offices. ‘After significant reflection, the Association has concluded that customers deserve to know, in clear language, what they are applying to their skin. The Skin Transparency Disclosure simply requires participating brands to provide that clarity.’
Park-Marchetti clarified that the new standard would not require brands to remove any specific ingredients, but rather to describe them honestly. Ingredients that participating brands have, in recent years, marketed as snail mucin essence, glacial volcanic clay, deep-sea ferment complex, and lunar-aged peptide will, under the new standard, be required to disclose their actual chemical composition in standard format alongside the marketing language.
The standard, according to the Association’s 84-page guidance document, requires that each product label include a small clarifying parenthetical immediately following each marketing-language ingredient. The parenthetical, the document specifies, must include the ingredient’s actual chemical name, its source, and what the document calls a brief functional description.
Among the Newly Clarified: ‘Snail Mucin’ Now Labeled ‘(Actually, Snail Mucus)’
The reform has, according to leaked draft labels, already produced a number of newly clarified entries. Snail Mucin Essence, a popular ingredient previously listed in poetic terms, will now be labeled (actually, snail mucus, harvested via a process the brand prefers not to describe). Glacial Volcanic Clay, marketed for its ancient mineral properties, will be labeled (essentially, ground rock from a tested deposit). Deep-Sea Ferment Complex, used in over 240 products, will be labeled (a fermented yeast solution, prepared in a lab in Suwon).
According to The Korea Times, the Association has retained a Gangnam-based regulatory consultancy on a 1.4 billion won contract to develop standardized parenthetical conventions and to assist brands in completing the disclosure transition.
Customers Express ‘Quiet Relief’
Reaction among Korean cosmetics customers has been, sources say, quietly relieved. Long-time K-beauty enthusiast and Seoul resident Min-jung Kim-Park told The Straits Times that the new disclosures had, in her view, formalized a relationship she had been navigating informally for years.
‘I have, for years, applied products containing ingredients whose actual nature I could not, candidly, identify,’ Kim-Park said. ‘I would, on these occasions, simply trust the marketing language. I will now know, before purchase, what I am about to apply. The transparency is, in many ways, refreshing.’
Industry analyst Dr. Soo-yeon Lim-Reyes of the entirely fictional Seoul Cosmetics Studies Initiative described the new framework as a textbook example of what she called the post-poetic phase of consumer regulation. ‘For most of the last decade,’ Lim-Reyes explained, ‘these brands operated in what we might call the poetic mode, in which the gap between marketing language and chemical reality was, itself, part of the appeal. The post-poetic phase simply asks the brands to dispense with the gap.’
Some Brands Are Reportedly ‘Resisting the Reform’
Not all participating brands have welcomed the new standard. At least seven mid-sized Korean cosmetics brands have, sources confirm, indicated they intend to leave the Association rather than comply with the disclosure requirement. The departing brands, in a joint letter, have argued that the disclosure framework strips away what one brand executive described as the necessary atmospheric mystique of the K-beauty experience.
‘The customer who purchases a snail mucin essence does not, in any meaningful sense, want to be told that the essence is snail mucus,’ the joint letter argues. ‘They want the essence. They want, in some sense, to apply something whose precise nature is gracefully obscured. The disclosure framework, by labeling the mucus as mucus, undermines the very atmosphere that gives the mucus its appeal.’
For more on the long arc of K-beauty cultural production, see The London Prat’s earlier reporting on the political economy of Korean cosmetics, which traced the genre’s structural conventions back to the early 2000s rise of the modern K-beauty export industry.
The Skin Transparency Disclosure, the Association confirms, will be reviewed annually, with potential expansion to fragrance under early consideration. Internal documents reference a possible Fragrance Honesty Standard, which would similarly require Korean fragrance brands to disclose, in plain language, what their products actually smell like.
The Korean Consumer Affairs Commission, which oversees product labeling regulation across the cosmetics sector, has issued a brief statement welcoming the Association’s voluntary adoption of the Disclosure Standard while noting that, in its view, the practice ought to apply to non-Association brands as well. The Commission has indicated it is studying whether to advance a parallel mandatory regulatory framework over the coming twelve months.
For dispatches from elsewhere in the post-poetic-marketing beat, see The Onion.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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