Bespoke Korean-style skincare manufacturing

Korean-style skincare manufacturer for every step of the routine

For brands looking for a Korean skincare manufacturer, we develop and make bespoke Korean-style cleansers, toners, essences, serums, creams, sleeping masks and sheet masks in our Leicester facility, built as formulas your brand owns and documented for the UK, the EU and the US. We fill each product into bottles, droppers, airless pumps, tubes or jars, or load sheet masks with a measured dose of essence and seal them in sachets. Each product comes with its specification, INCI ingredient list, stability and challenge test reports, safety report and a certificate of analysis for every batch.

Korean-style skincare is a routine of gentle steps, layered from thin to rich. We develop every step.

• Cleansers. Cleansing oils and balms that emulsify in water, and mildly acidic gel and foam cleansers for a double cleanse.
• Toners and essences. Hydrating toners, rice and ferment essences, and exfoliating toners for pore care.
• Serums and ampoules. Concentrates with niacinamide, centella, peptides or spicules, and PDRN skincare serums. Our active serum manufacturing page covers vitamin C, retinoids and acids.
• Emulsions, creams and masks. Light emulsions, gel creams, sleeping masks, wash-off clay masks, and sheet masks loaded with essence and sealed in sachets.
• Sun care. Light daily sun creams for the UK and the EU, where sunscreens are cosmetics; in the US, they are drugs.
• Hair and body. Scalp tonics on our scalp care page, glass-hair shine serums through our haircare manufacturing, and Korean-style washes and lotions through our body care manufacturing.

Brands brief us on finishes as much as ingredients. Glass skin is a clear, dewy, light-reflecting look built from layers of hydration; pore care aims for pores that look smaller. Earlier heroes such as snail mucin and heartleaf are now staples, and spicules are a newer name on the shelf. J-beauty, Japan's style of minimal routines, light lotions, milky emulsions and daily sun care, rewards the same skills: light textures, stable formulas and gentle actives.

Some private label K-beauty is a stock formula that anyone can buy under their own name. We build each product to your brief, or adapt one of our tested bases. Your formula is yours, as our formula ownership commitment sets out, and R&D is a paid stage that can be included with an order of the right size. Our skincare and cosmetic manufacturing hub covers the wider range.

From brief to finished routine

Development runs in stages with our research and development team. We start from your brief: the routine, the finish, the hero ingredients, the claims and the markets. We benchmark the textures you admire, build prototypes, and refine them with you through sensory rounds on spread, absorption, finish and scent. A routine is developed as a set, so the essence, serum and cream share a pH window, a preservative strategy and a scent story. The chosen formulas then go into stability, challenge and compatibility testing in their final packs, and we scale each one from laboratory batch to production batch against the same specification.

Cica, snail mucin and spicules: what we control in each

Korean heroes and what we control

Spicules: what they do and what we claim

Spicules are sold as "liquid microneedling". In pig skin and animal studies, spicules from the sponge Haliclona disrupted the skin barrier in a dose-dependent way, stayed in the skin and raised the delivery of a large test molecule (Zhang and colleagues, Molecular Pharmaceutics, 2017). That mechanism is where the line sits, because a cosmetic is applied to the outside of the body. In the US, FDA's guidance on microneedling products reads a claim to penetrate living layers of skin as a sign of a device, while products that don't penetrate living skin and claim only a smoother look and feel generally are not devices. So our spicule claims describe the look and feel of the skin's surface, never channels, depth or delivery. In production, we suspend spicules evenly in a gel or essence base, check every supplier lot for particle size, purity and microbiology, and confirm even distribution through stability.

Layering, pH and penetration

A routine is a system, so we design the steps together. Skin's surface is naturally acidic, on average below pH 5 (Lambers and colleagues, International Journal of Cosmetic Science, 2006), so cleansers and toners sit in a mildly acidic range. Molecules above about 500 daltons cross intact skin poorly (Bos and Meinardi, Experimental Dermatology, 2000), so hyaluronic acid, most peptides and the larger molecules in snail filtrate work mainly at the surface. We also check each active against the steps around it, so an acid toner and a retinoid serum in one routine stay within a tolerable total.

Textures, ferments and preservation

Light, watery textures are harder to build than rich ones: essences need humectant blends and gentle thickeners that stay clear and stable, and cleansing oils need emulsifiers that rinse clean. Extracts and ferment filtrates also feed microbes, so we build preservative systems from the preservatives annex of the Cosmetics Regulation, within its limits, and prove them by challenge testing. Where a brief includes fragrance or essential oils, we declare their allergens to each market's list.

Compounding essences and loading sheet masks, batch by batch

1. Specify. We agree ingredients and grades, marker specifications for extracts, claims, pack and markets, and screen every ingredient against each market's annexes.
2. Approve suppliers. Every material comes from a supplier approved before use and reviewed every year, with certificates of analysis checked on every lot.
3. Compound. Water phases are hydrated and dispersed, emulsions are built phase by phase, and heat-sensitive extracts, ferments and actives go in as the batch cools. Cleansing oils and balms are blended without water, with their emulsifier and antioxidant.
4. Check, fill and label. Appearance, odour, pH, viscosity and fill weight are checked against the specification; products are filled into bottles, droppers, pumps, tubes or jars, or loaded onto sheets in a measured dose of essence and sealed in sachets; labels are verified on every batch.
5. Test, retain and release. Every batch is tested by accredited partner laboratories (ISO/IEC 17025) as part of every order, three retained samples per batch are kept for shelf life plus one year, and quality control releases every batch against its specification.

Assessing a layered routine, not just one product

Every product has a cosmetic product safety report (CPSR) before it goes on sale in the UK or the EU: Part A gathers the safety data, and Part B is the conclusion of a qualified safety assessor. For layered routines, the assessor looks at exposure across the products used together; for spicules, at level, particle size and frequency of use. We run the test programme with accredited partner laboratories:

• Stability in the final pack, accelerated and real-time, with temperature cycling and light exposure, tracking appearance, colour, odour, pH, viscosity and marker or active content.
• Compatibility between formula and pack, including droppers, airless pumps and sheet-mask sachets.
• Challenge testing to ISO 11930 for every product that contains water; low-risk anhydrous oils and balms can be assessed under ISO 29621.
• Claims tests, arranged with specialist partners: dermatologist-supervised patch tests, hydration readings and imaging for the look of pores and lines.

We make every product in our Leicester facility. We are ISO 9001 certified by BSI, and the scope of our certificate, FS 822806, includes cosmetics. Our stability and shelf life testing page sets out the method.

With every product, you receive the agreed specification, the ingredient list in INCI names, the stability, challenge and compatibility reports, the CPSR and product information file built with your Responsible Person, and a certificate of analysis for every batch from our accredited partner laboratories.

Selling Korean-style skincare in the UK, the EU and the US

We build every Korean-style product for the UK, the EU and the US from the first brief. As of October 2026:

• Great Britain. A UK Responsible Person, a CPSR and notification through the SCPN service before sale. We arrange the CPSR with a qualified safety assessor, build the product file with you and support the notification.
• European Union and Northern Ireland. A Responsible Person in the EU, or in Northern Ireland for that market, a CPSR and notification through the CPNP. Labels for the EU state the country of origin, and products placed on the EU market after 31 July 2026 name around 80 fragrance allergens, so we write every label to that list.
• United States. Under MoCRA, the manufacturing facility is registered with FDA, and the responsible person named on the label lists each product. Our FDA registration is a food facility registration for dietary supplements, so we register our Leicester facility under MoCRA as US skincare programmes start. Sunscreens are drugs in the US, so our Korean-style sun creams are made for the UK and the EU.

Korean claims, rewritten for each market

In Korea, whitening, wrinkle and UV claims belong to approved functional cosmetics; the UK, the EU and the US have no such approval route for cosmetics. We rewrite each claim as a cosmetic claim backed by tests, "brighter-looking skin" with imaging and "fewer visible lines" with instrumental readings, each meeting the UK and EU common criteria for cosmetic claims.

Korean-style, made in Leicester

"Korean-inspired" describes a style. EU labels must state where an imported cosmetic was made, and EU consumer law counts origin as a main characteristic of a product, so "made in Korea", or Korean script and flags used to suggest it, don't belong on a Leicester-made product. Start your project with your routine, claims and markets.

References: Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products (2009); Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 on fragrance allergen labelling (2023); Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, Korea, cosmetics exports in the first half of 2026 (2026); US FDA, Regulatory Considerations for Microneedling Products (2020); Zhang and colleagues, Molecular Pharmaceutics (2017); Bylka and colleagues, Advances in Dermatology and Allergology (2013); Lambers and colleagues, International Journal of Cosmetic Science (2006); Bos and Meinardi, Experimental Dermatology (2000).