A Pharmacist on the New Beauty Trend: K-Pharma and K-Beauty Are Empty Labels, and We Already Knew the Ingredients

Korean cosmetics have changed their haircut. Colourful packaging with cartoon characters has given way to white bottles, clinical typography and the word "pharmacy" - the new term is "K-pharma". Pharmacist Inmaculada Canterla says the thing the industry does not want said out loud: "K-pharma and K-beauty are empty labels."

Her argument is technical, but easy to check. What actually works, she says, are already familiar ingredients: stable vitamin C derivatives, well-formulated retinoids, biomimetic peptides, EGF, ectoin, centella asiatica, PDRN, NAD, lipoic acid and SOD. Not one of them is a new discovery, and not one of them is Korean.

The question, in her view, is not where the ingredient comes from but whether the formulation carries it to where it needs to go: "What is interesting is not that they come from Korea, but whether the delivery system allows them to arrive where they should, at the right concentration."

Then comes the sentence worth taping to every mirror: "Being sold in a pharmacy, or the use of pharmaceutical language, guarantees nothing by itself." That holds for our own pharmacy shelves too, where the same marketing trick has worked for years - if it is behind the counter, it must be serious.

Canterla finishes without a shred of diplomacy: "K-pharma, K-beauty or whatever they call the next name, changes nothing. What works is serious formulation, whether it is American, German, Swiss or Korean." In other words - the label on the front is the advertisement, and the composition on the back is the product. How many of us read the second one?