Serum · Beauty of Joseon

Beauty of Joseon Glow Serum: the Korean bottle prints 59.94%, the English one doesn't

By Sunny Park · Updated September 14, 2026 · A third of a 30ml bottle in

Heads up: some links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. I bought this bottle with my own money, and my honest opinion is never for sale.

The name is the first ingredient, and that is rarer than it should be

Most of what I do on this site is tell people that a Korean product named after a plant contains a whisper of that plant. Heartleaf at 10ppm. Ginseng oil whose first ingredient is soybean. It becomes a habit, reading the front of a box and bracing.

Here the brace was unnecessary. Propolis extract is ingredient number one and the figure beside it is 59.94%. Not rounded to 60, which I find quietly reassuring — that is a number from a formula sheet rather than a marketing deck.

One honest qualification, because I would rather you hear it from me. An extract is the active carried in a solvent, so 59.94% is 59.94% of extract, not of raw propolis from a hive. Nobody puts 60% raw propolis in a serum; it would be a candle. What the figure tells you is that the propolis preparation is the base of this product rather than a garnish floating near the preservatives. On the labels I usually read, the named ingredient is sitting down at the bottom with the xanthan gum.

If you want the method behind all of this, I wrote it up in how to read the percentages on a Korean label.

Niacinamide is 2%, and 2% is the floor

The second printed figure is niacinamide at 2%, and this one needs a little context that the bottle assumes you already have.

Korea keeps a list of approved functional ingredients with a permitted concentration band for each one. Niacinamide is on it for brightening at 2 to 5%. Put it in at 2% and you may register the product as a whitening functional cosmetic, which is what the Korean box declares. Put in less and you may not.

So this serum sits at the bottom of the approved band. I am not going to soften that, because the whole point of the number is that you can see where a product sits. Serums built around brightening tend to run at 4 or 5%, further up the same band.

What I will say is that the band exists at all, and that you can read it. On an American box, a brightening serum says “with niacinamide” and there is nothing whatsoever to compare — you cannot tell 2% from 0.2%. Korea makes the brand print the number, so the floor and the ceiling are both visible. That is the thing worth having, not the 2%.

Water is the fifth ingredient, and that explains everything you will feel

Here is the part I would have missed if I had only used the product and not read the list. The top of a serum is almost always water. This one goes:

Three glycols sitting above the water. That single fact predicted everything I noticed on my hands before I ever looked at the box.

It comes out of the dropper somewhere between water and jelly. On skin it travels a little, so you want to be quick about patting it in rather than letting it sit. And then it is completely gone. Not absorbed-with-a-slight-film gone — gone. No tack, no residue, nothing you can feel with a fingertip.

That is glycols behaving exactly as glycols do. They pull water in and vanish without leaving anything on top. Which is a wonderful feeling on a hot day and a small problem the rest of the year, because nothing is left to seal it in.

So it finishes dry, and you need something over it

Scan the rest of the Korean list for anything that would sit on skin and hold moisture in. There is one humectant of any real weight, sodium hyaluronate, and it is tenth. There is no facial oil worth the name, no ceramide, no butter, no squalane. The only oil in the whole formula is tamanu seed oil, well down the list.

So call this what it is: a treatment step, not a moisturising one. It is genuinely mild — three weeks in, a third of the bottle gone, and it has not broken me out once, including on days when my skin was being difficult. But mild is not the same as comforting.

My cheeks are dry and my T-zone is oily, so one application tells me two things. On the dry side, no irritation and no improvement either; it simply disappeared and left my cheeks exactly as dry as it found them. On the oily side, it was the best thing I could have put on. Put a moisturiser over it and the dry-skin problem goes away entirely — but you do have to actually do that.

There is a BHA in here, and it is why oily skin does better

Further down the Korean list, past the extracts, sits betaine salicylate. That is a gentle salicylic acid derivative — a BHA, the family that works inside pores rather than on the surface.

It is not at a level that makes this an exfoliating product, and the box makes no such claim. But it is there, and it lines up with everything else: a glycol base, no occlusive oils, a dry finish, and a mild BHA. Four different signals all pointing at the same person, which is oily and combination skin.

I like it when my own experience and the label say the same thing, because it means neither of us is guessing. I worked out that this suited my T-zone better than my cheeks by using it. The label tells you why, before you spend anything.

Nothing in here smells

No fragrance. No parfum. And nothing aromatic hiding at the end of the list, which is the part most reviews never check.

Tea tree is on the list as an extract, not as tea tree oil. The single plant oil is tamanu seed oil, which is not a fragrance material. Compare that with the celimax cleansing oil, which declares bergamot along with linalool and limonene, or with the make p:rem cleansing milk in the milk comparison, whose Korean list is sold as low-irritation and still closes with bergamot and clary oil. Both are honestly declared. This one simply has none of it.

If fragrance is the thing you screen for, this serum passes on a strict reading, not a generous one.

The English label is the same list with the numbers taken out

I always check both sides of the box, and this is the cleanest example I have found of why.

The English ingredient list is identical to the Korean one, word for word, in exactly the same order: Propolis Extract, Dipropylene Glycol, Glycerin, Butylene Glycol, Water, Niacinamide, and on down. Same formula, same factory, same bottle.

What the English side does not have is a single number. No 59.94% beside the propolis. No 2% beside the niacinamide. No whitening functional cosmetic registration anywhere. The Korean box also warns against use on children under three; the English caution does not mention it.

Nothing improper is happening here — different markets have different labelling rules, and Beauty of Joseon is following each one. But the practical result is that the best argument for buying this product is printed only in a language most of its buyers cannot read. The propolis figure is the strongest thing on the bottle and it is invisible outside Korea.

So, should you buy it

My stamp is Will buy again, and I want to be exact about when. Not as my one serum for the year — through a cold dry winter I would want something with more to hold onto. But on a hot, humid day, a serum that vanishes and leaves nothing behind is not a compromise, it is the point. That is the bottle I will replace.