glowupkoreanbeauty

    For as long as I can remember, sunscreen wasn’t just a skincare step in my house—it was a philosophy. My mother spent decades working as a professional skincare counselor in Korea, and our home was always filled with new products, tester bottles, early prototypes, and boxes labeled with names I couldn’t pronounce as a kid. Back then, I didn’t understand why Koreans treated sunscreen with such seriousness. To me, it was just one more bottle on the bathroom shelf.   It wasn’t until my early twenties, when my own skin collapsed into severe breakouts and sensitivity, that I began to understand why Koreans obsess over textures, ingredients, and the feeling of a product on the skin. During that period, I tested more sunscreens than most people will use in their whole lives—mineral, hybrid, tone-up, gel, cushion formats, fragrance-free versions, post-treatment sunscreens, the whole spectrum. And the more I tried, the more obvious it became: Korean sunscreens are built diffe...