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KOREAN PHARMACY

Routines

A Korean routine, argued from the ingredient list rather than from a personality quiz

Everybody in this category will build you a routine. Almost nobody will show you why they chose what they chose, because showing you requires holding the ingredient lists, and holding the ingredient lists is expensive. We hold them. So every product below arrives with the entries we ranked it on and the position each one occupies on that product’s own declared list, and the full list is one click away on the product page for you to check the claim against.

Method reviewed by Nurcan SaglamLicensed dermo-cosmetic expert, Paris. Director of NN Academy de Paris.

Build yours

Three questions. No account, no email, no wall in front of the answer.

1What is your skin doing?
2How does it feel by two in the afternoon?

A better question than skin type, because it is answerable by looking. It is also the one that decides gel against cream.

3What can your skin not have?

Optional, and the reason this works. Rule something out and we only offer products whose own declared ingredient list names none of it.

The result gets its own URL. Bookmark it, send it to someone, come back in a month to buy step three.

Or start from one of the seven

Each one is a real routine, built by the same engine at its default answers, ranked against 3,295 published ingredient lists across 5,052 products you can buy today. The products on the card are the products on the page.

How the picking actually works

An ingredient list is not a set of ingredients. It is an ordered list, running from the highest concentration down to one percent, and below one percent in whatever order the manufacturer likes. That ordering is printed on every carton in the world and it is the most under-used piece of public information in skincare, because using it means holding the lists for a whole catalog rather than for the six products you felt like writing about.

So the engine never asks whether a toner contains panthenol. Every toner in Korea contains panthenol. It asks where panthenol sits, and a toner declaring it fourth is a different product from one declaring it thirty-first. Each concern has a set of entries it reaches for, each entry carries a weight, and each weight is multiplied by what its position on the list is worth. Then the whole thing gets printed back to you as the reason, with the positions in it, so you can disagree.

The third question is the one nothing else in this category can ask. Rule out fragrance, denatured alcohol, essential oils, silicones or sulfate surfactants and we only offer products whose own declared list names none of them. That also removes every product whose list we hold too incompletely to say so honestly, which shrinks the pool twice over. Each routine page prints both numbers rather than hiding the second one.

What none of this does is tell you what a product will do to your skin. That is not modesty, it is where the line sits: a position on a list is a fact you can check against a document we publish in full, and an outcome is not. Read the reasoning, read the list, and overrule any step you like.