Korean skincare has gone viral, sparking a craze that has prompted the rapid expansion of Korean skincare companies in the UK and beyond. Korean brands are enjoying the spotlight and are typically considered more prestigious and effective compared to their Western counterparts.
But, how much of this is branding, backed by celebrity endorsements, social influencers, and clever marketing, to redirect your spending?
This article explains the fundamental differences in Korea’s skincare philosophy compared to Western practices, helping you to separate fact from fiction, ensuring the best results for your skin.
Opulent Aesthetics is passionate about skincare and follows the latest science-backed research to provide the best advice you can safely rely on in your daily life, while delivering professional beauty treatments in Caterham.
What is Korean skincare all about?
Korean skincare follows a simple philosophy: prevention is better than cure. It encourages adopting daily practices centred around nourishing your skin, using mild, natural ingredients that improve your skin’s health slowly over time.
Korean skincare involves a multi-step process, often layering 8-10 gentle products, each one complementing the efforts of the one before it. With protection and nourishment at its core, the focus tends to be centred around:
- Protection from the sun
- Lasting hydration – hydration is extremely important for your skin.
- Gentle, natural ingredients
- Layering high-quality products for maximum effect
Koreans are taught from an early age to apply sunscreen daily, irrespective of the weather. Korean sunscreen brands deliver SPF factor 50, protecting from both UV and UVB rays.
The best part is that Korean sunscreen is light, silky, and non-sticky, making daily use convenient and easier to wear with makeup. Check out the following brands: Beauty of Joseon, Isntree, and Roundlab Birch.
Korean skincare is never about getting quick results from harsh, active ingredients. Instead, it prioritises a gradual approach to enhancing skin health using mild, natural ingredients like:
- Fermented ingredients like rice, soybean, liquorice, green tea, galactomyces, lysate, lactobacillus, ginseng, and bifida, each providing varying nutrients and benefits.
- Fermentation mimics natural processes found in ecosystems, transforming raw ingredients into more potent, bioavailable forms. This results in more collagen and elastin production, higher antioxidants, improved skin biome, enhanced barrier protection, and better hydration, to name a few.
- Snail mucin, known for its silky texture and hydrating formula, is almost miraculous. It stimulates fibroblast and collagen production, promoting faster wound healing and anti-ageing. As it contains natural sources of hyaluronic acid and glycoproteins, it hydrates the skin deeply. The glycolic acids also exfoliate dead skin cells to improve pigmentation, skin tone while promoting higher skin cell turnover.
- Centella asiatica, a medicinal herb native to Asia recognised for its healing qualities that repair your skin, contains active compounds such as asiaticoside, madecassoside, asiatic acid, and madecassic acid. It works by stimulating collagen synthesis, promoting new cell growth, while reducing inflammation and hydrating your skin. It is recognised for soothing irritated skin, particularly those suffering from acne, eczema, or psoriasis. What’s more, the collagen-boosting effect makes it a fantastic anti-ageing tool.
How about Western skincare practices?
Western skincare philosophy focuses on prioritising fast results, often to correct issues, rather than prevent them. It relies heavily on active ingredients that can be quite harsh on the skin, and arguably not ideal for constant, long-term use.
A Western skincare routine normally has 3-5 steps and uses much thicker, richer creams and products, making layering more difficult. This isn’t to say that the approach is ineffective or inferior; it simply has different goals.
Let’s consider some examples. Western cultures typically abstain from applying daily sunscreen, unless they are visiting the beach. Western sunscreen tends to be much thicker and greasier, leaving marks or shine, making it difficult to apply products over it.
Their serums and treatment creams tend to have high concentrations of active ingredients like retinols, vitamin C, or glycolic acids, which are fast-acting, and results are noticed with fewer applications over several months.
A typical Western routine looks like this:
- Cleanser
- Toner (often skipped)
- Treatment product (like a serum or exfoliant)
- Moisturiser
- Sunscreen (mostly skipped)
The Korean daily routine looks like this:
- Oil-based cleanser
- Water-based cleanser
- Exfoliator
- Toner
- Essence
- Serum
- Sheet mask
- Eye cream
- Moisturiser
- Sunscreen (day protection)
- Nightpack (night protection)
As you can see, the Koreans take a more detailed, holistic approach to skincare, with a long-term view. It requires more time and effort, but the rewards speak for themselves.
Which approach should you follow?
The truth is that both are invaluable and have their place, and the one that is right for you greatly depends on your current skin condition. That said, a blended approach could work best, but what would that look like?
If you have existing skin conditions that need addressing, then it would probably serve you to adopt the Western approach to skincare to begin with and until your skin concern has either been corrected or is at least well managed. Then, transition to the Korean approach, taking a long-term view.
For example, if you have dry or flaky skin, use a high-concentration exfoliant to get rid of dead skin cells before applying a high-concentration serum like vitamin C and hyaluronic acid, which will help repair and hydrate your skin barrier.
Further, if you have early signs of ageing, like fine lines or wrinkles, applying a retinoid followed by a deep moisturiser will help smooth them out to a certain point, after which you will see diminishing returns. At that point, switching to the Korean model of skincare will see your skin quality enhance slowly over time, and the milder products are less compromising to your skin, ensuring that it stays looking and feeling healthier for longer.
How to get the best of both at the same time
You might find yourself thinking that sticking with either the Western or Korean approach leaves good skincare practices on the table, and your FOMO alarm isn’t wrong. While they may not be directly compatible, there is a way to get the best of both worlds without conflict.
Opulent Aesthetics recommends taking the Korean approach to your daily skincare and implementing professional beauty treatments for deeper fixes is a great way to merge both practices.
Professional beauty treatments like microneedling and facial peels correct skin defects like hyperpigmentation, smoothing fine lines and wrinkles, while stimulating collagen and elastin production, accelerating your anti-ageing results. Going deeper still, implementing skin booster and polynucleotide injections aligns with Korean skincare’s underlying goal to nurture your skin from within, giving it everything it needs to heal and improve.
Final thoughts
There is no denying that taking a long-term approach often works best. Having said that, the skincare benefits of professional beauty treatments like microneedling with exosomes, facial peels, skin boosters and polynucleotide injections are widely recognised. Combining these practices offers the best of both worlds, ensuring a robust and powerful anti-ageing antidote.
Opulent Aesthetics delivers professional beauty treatments in Caterham. Its cosy studio is favoured by women and men in nearby communities, who consistently choose Opulent Aesthetics as their preferred clinic, over more proximate practitioners.
Our results speak for themselves, and the fact that our customers travel from Croydon, Sutton, Bromley, and Beckenham is testimony to the quality treatments we provide.
If you want to find out more about how Opulent Aesthetics can complement your skincare routine, give Sadie a call today or book an appointment onlinne.