Beauty of Joseon Guide: What to Buy, What to Skip

Beauty of Joseon is a Korean skincare brand built almost entirely on rice extract and ginseng, priced for volume rather than prestige. Most of the range sits in the ₩12,000–30,000 band that covers the majority of restocked Olive Young products, and one item carried the brand overseas: the Relief Sun: Rice + Probiotics SPF50+ PA++++ cream, ₩12,000–18,000 for 50ml in Korea. The sunscreen is genuinely good. The rest of the line is competent and ordinary, and the low price reflects mass-market positioning, not a luxury formula sold by mistake.

Two reasons, and neither of them is marketing.

The first is the filter. Mineral UV filters (zinc oxide, titanium dioxide) are physically white, which is where white cast comes from. Korean formulators work with a wider set of chemical filters than most US formulas can use, and chemical filters are clear. Relief Sun is a chemical SPF50+ PA++++ with essentially no cast, which is why it kept turning up in videos from people with medium and deep skin who were tired of grey films.

The second is the price. About ₩15,000 for 50ml of SPF50+ PA++++ on a Seoul shelf. I don't know what it costs where you live once import margin lands on it, but that gap is why people here buy three at a time.

On the label itself: SPF50+ is the UVB number, PA++++ is the UVA rating, and both are as high as the two systems go. The catch is quantity. Those ratings are measured with far more product than most people apply, and outdoors you need to reapply every two to three hours. A sunscreen you under-apply once at 8am is not an SPF50 sunscreen. Filters and cast are covered properly in the no-white-cast sunscreen guide, and the wider sun protection notes have the reapplication maths.

It gets recommended as though it works on everyone. It doesn't.

• Dry skin. It dries down matte. On dry skin that reads as tight by mid-afternoon and shows every flake. Put a moisturiser underneath and give it a minute before the sunscreen goes on.
• Sensitive eyes. Chemical filters sting some people's eyes and this one is no exception. If your eyes already water with sunscreen, this is not the bottle that fixes it. A mineral formula is the trade, and you accept the cast that comes with it.
• Anyone expecting glow. The finish is flat. If you want dew, you want a different sunscreen, or a moisturiser under it doing that work.
• Anyone treating it as skincare. Rice extract, grain ferment and niacinamide are all on the label, but this is a sunscreen. It won't even out your tone on its own. Sunscreen prevents; it doesn't correct. Tone work belongs to niacinamide and about twelve weeks of patience.

The brand renames and reformulates fairly often, so read the box rather than a two-year-old review. This is how the main lines break down by what they are actually for.

If you take one row from that table, take the first. Relief Sun is the only product here where the brand does something better than the average Korean equivalent. Everything else has three alternatives at the same price.

Not because someone mispriced it, and not because it is a luxury formula hiding in plain packaging.

Korea has a very large contract manufacturing industry, so a brand can order a competent, well-tested formula at scale without owning a factory or a lab. That strips out the two costs that push a Western equivalent to ₩60,000: development overhead, and the packaging and marketing built to justify the number on the box. Beauty of Joseon ships plain bottles, sells enormous volume through Olive Young and export, and prices for people buying the same sunscreen six times a year.

What that means in practice: the formula is good, the packaging is basic, the margin per unit is thin. Read the price as a fair price for an ordinary good product, not as a discount on something secretly premium.

The flip side matters too. Rice extract and ginseng aren't proprietary, and nothing in this range is unique to the brand. If Relief Sun vanished tomorrow, several Korean sunscreens at the same price would cover it. That is a healthy thing to know before you build a whole shelf around one logo.

I keep Relief Sun on rotation. I stopped buying most of the rest, and here is where.

• The cleansing balm. I used one jar and went back to whatever was on 1+1 that month. Sunscreen removal is a solved problem at ₩10,000.
• The eye serum, if you already use a retinoid. Two retinoids is not twice the result, it is twice the irritation. Pick one, use it twice a week at night, wear sunscreen the next day.
• The full rice routine. Toner, essence, serum, cream, all from one brand, all built on the same extract. That is four products doing one product's job. A cleanser, a moisturiser and sunscreen is the actual routine and the rest is optional, which the beginner routine guide lays out step by step.
• Brand loyalty in general. The most expensive habit in skincare is deciding one brand is yours and then buying its version of everything.

• Sunscreen sits at ₩12,000–18,000. Most of the rest of the range falls inside the ₩12,000–30,000 band. These are Korean retail bands observed at Olive Young, and they move during sale weeks, so treat them as a range and not a quote.
• Wait for 1+1 or 2+1. Olive Young runs these constantly and Beauty of Joseon turns up in them often. The shelf tag is the price that matters, not the sticker on the box.
• Don't buy six. Sunscreen has a shelf life and you won't finish six bottles before it lapses. Two is a sensible souvenir.
• The tourist tax refund still covers cosmetics. Retail cosmetics qualify with your passport, and the larger Olive Young stores apply the discount instantly at the register. This is separate from the VAT refund on cosmetic medical procedures, which ended on 1 January 2026. A lot of older posts still mix the two up.

If you are working out where to shop, Olive Young against Daiso covers what is genuinely cheaper in each, and the store directory lists the branches with the biggest foreigner-facing counters.

Relief Sun sits in the product set olyoung.shop built from its tally of 482 real user recommendations across 323 products, run on 17 August 2026. No brand paid for a place on it. The useful reality check is what sits at the top of that tally: the most-mentioned single product is AESTURA's Atobarrier 365 Cream, with 14 recommendations, an 80ml fragrance-free ceramide cream at ₩28,000–39,000. Not a trend. A plain barrier cream.

That is roughly what a sane shelf looks like. One sunscreen you will actually reapply, one ceramide cream, a gentle cleanser, and time. Beauty of Joseon covers the first slot cheaply and well, and that is a real compliment.

The full list with prices and caveats is on the Beauty of Joseon brand page, and Relief Sun's ranking entry shows where it landed. If your skin flushes at everything, start at the sensitive-skin notes instead of at a sunscreen.