UV filters, actives, ratings, and how the numbers are tested.
Glutathione has made it into Korean sunscreen. On 30 September 2026, Abib’s glutathione CC sunscreen, sold as a toning tube, was 41st in Olive Young Korea’s sun care sales ranking.[1] Glutathione “is a tripeptide consisting of cysteine, glycine, and glutamate and functions as a major antioxidant.” Your body makes its own.[2] A 2025 systematic review…
On 30 September 2026, the fifth best-selling product in Olive Young Korea’s sun care ranking was a tranexamic acid sunscreen from celimax.[1] Tranexamic acid, or TXA, is also a drug. A 2023 review describes it as “a synthetic derivative of the amino acid lysine” that the FDA approved for heavy periods and for preventing bleeding…
Finding a Korean sunscreen without niacinamide is harder than it sounds, because the same brands sell tubes with it and tubes without it. Beauty of Joseon’s Relief Sun, Round Lab’s Birch Juice Moisturizing Sun Cream and Torriden’s Dive-In Moisture all list niacinamide in the top ten of their Korean ingredient lists. Their sister tubes, the…
Two long names keep turning up on the back of Korean sunscreens: terephthalylidene dicamphor sulfonic acid and drometrizole trisiloxane. Those are the filters L’Oreal sells as Mexoryl SX and Mexoryl XL. Once you know the names, finding a Korean sunscreen with Mexoryl is easy. Finding one with Mexoryl printed on a US Drug Facts panel…
Read enough ingredient lists and a pattern shows up. On a US sunscreen, avobenzone almost never appears by itself. There is a second filter listed a line or two below it, and it is there for a reason the marketing copy never mentions. On a Korean sunscreen built around Uvinul A Plus, that second filter…
Exosomes are the biotech ingredient dominating K-beauty marketing right now, and the claims have arrived before the sunscreens have. The word shows up on serums, toners, creams, masks, and ampoules from Medicube, VT, Dr. Melaxin, APLB, Neogen, and more. But search an ingredient database for an exosome sunscreen, and the shelf is nearly empty. We…
Salmon DNA is the biggest ingredient story in K-beauty right now, and in 2026 it reached the sunscreen aisle. A PDRN sunscreen promises the usual SPF plus something that sounds like a clinic treatment: DNA fragments that help your skin repair itself. One trend site describes the best-known product this way: “a meaningful PDRN concentration…
The collar looked clean going into the machine. It came out with a yellow band along the neckline, or worse, an orange one, and the first question is the right one: does sunscreen stain clothes, or was it something else? Usually it was the sunscreen, and more precisely one ingredient in it. This article is…
In July 2026, Consumer Reports published a test a lot of people had been waiting for: three K-beauty brands, the Korean formula of each against the formula the same brand sells in the United States, measured in the same lab. The Consumer Reports Korean sunscreen test was shared on the strength of one number, that…
This one begins on an ingredient database page rather than in a lab. The INCIDecoder entry for panthenol says the ingredient “can reduce the irritation caused by less-nice other ingredients (e.g. fragrance, preservatives or chemical sunscreens)”[1]. Chemical sunscreens, named directly. Read that sentence once and you can see where the shopping advice comes from: put…