Korean skincare, without the marketing in the way.
An independent guide to K-beauty for everyone shopping it from outside Korea — built on ingredient lists, not claims.
What this is
Metic Beauty is a reference for Korean skincare, written for the people buying it from outside Korea. We catalog products from brands including Anua, Beauty of Joseon, COSRX, Mediheal, Round Lab, SKIN1004 and Torriden, and we lead with the ingredient list, the pack size and the price instead of the copy on the front of the box. The name is the method: meticulous, about cosmetics.
Three tools sit alongside the catalog. The Routine Check takes the products in your AM and PM routine, compares the actives inside them against each other, and tells you which combinations irritate skin and what order to apply everything in. The Personal Color Finder reads your undertone and depth from a single photo, works out your seasonal palette, and returns the Korean cushion shade codes that match it. Get The Look lists the products makeup artists and brands credit for Korean celebrities’ looks.
Why it exists
Korean skincare reaches the rest of the world through its marketing. A product arrives as a “glass skin essence” or a “barrier repair cream”, and the one thing that would tell you whether it suits your skin — the ingredient list — is a wall of small type on the back of the box, when it is published in English at all.
That gap costs people money. Two products described in identical language can contain completely different actives, and some of those actives should never be layered together. We start from the ingredient list because it is the part that tells you something.
How products are chosen
The catalog is Korean brands only, single products rather than gift sets, ordered by what our partner retailers actually sell the most of. Names, prices, shades and photos come from the retailers’ product feeds and are refreshed daily, and where more than one shop sells a product, every price is listed.
What we add is the reading: the key actives pulled out of each product, the conflicts between them, and the shades picked for each personal color season. Product descriptions are the retailer’s own.
What we will not do
- Sell placement. No brand or retailer can buy a spot in the catalog, a position in a ranking, or a kinder write-up, and nobody outside this site sees a word before it publishes.
- Publish work we have not licensed. Product photos come from our retailer partners’ affiliate feeds, which license them for this use. Anything without a licensed photo is drawn as an illustrated tile instead.
- Pass off an example as a review. Where a review is written by us to demonstrate the format, it is labeled in the data itself, so it cannot quietly lose the label.
How it is funded
Metic Beauty earns a commission on some links to retailers, at no extra cost to you, and that commission has no say in what appears here. The affiliate disclosure has the details.
Who runs it
Metic Beauty is independent. No brand, retailer or distributor owns any part of it, funds it, or has any say in what it publishes.
Corrections and contact
If a price is wrong, an ingredient list is out of date, or something here reads as a claim we have not earned, tell us. Email admin@meticbeauty.com or find us on Instagram at @metic_beauty.