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Expensive to get wrongSouth Korea

A cosmetic that looks like food cannot be sold

The Cosmetics Act prohibits selling, manufacturing, importing, storing or displaying for sale any cosmetic likely to be consumed or misused as food because it imitates the shape, smell, colour, size, container or packaging of a food.

Dessert and drink styling is a recognisable house style in this category and it is the exact thing the prohibition names, so a pack that performs well on a feed in one market can be unsellable in the market the aesthetic came from.

92

92 of a possible 97Tier A, primary document or measured outcome. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 97, however good it looks.

Verified August 6, 2026Rechecked every 365 days, next by August 6, 2027.

Constraint

Held since February 1, 2012A rule, law or policy that limits what you may do or say. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

Subparagraph 10 of Article 15 is repealed, or narrowed so that only products actually shown to have been ingested fall within it.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

  1. Tier Aregulation

    Korea Ministry of Government Legislation (National Law Information Center): Cosmetics Act (Act No. 20901), English translation

    10. Cosmetics which are likely to be consumed or misused as food because they are imitating the shape, smell, color, size, container, package of foods.

    Article 15. The test is likelihood of misuse, not proof of it, and it reaches storage and display rather than only sale.

    Read 2026-08-06 · Open government · page hash 92590839801f

  2. Tier Aregulation

    Korea Ministry of Government Legislation (National Law Information Center): Cosmetics Act (Act No. 20901), English translation

    6. Cosmetics using the horns of rhinoceros or bones of tigers, or the extracts thereof;

    Quoted from the same list to show what kind of prohibition this sits beside. These are absolute bans on placing the product on the market, not labelling rules.

    Read 2026-08-06 · Open government · page hash 92590839801f

History

  1. v1created

    Initial entry from the Korean government's own English translation of the Cosmetics Act, read 2026-08-06 through the National Law Information Center Open API (target=elaw), which flags this text 현행, currently in force. Articles were taken from the publisher's own markup rather than split out of flattened text.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

  • kr
  • korea
  • packaging
  • product-safety
  • design
  • compliance
  • market-entry

Cite this entry

“A cosmetic that looks like food cannot be sold”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:kr:a-cosmetic-may-not-look-like-food, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/kr--a-cosmetic-may-not-look-like-food. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

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Free to quote, cite and act on. Not to resell or redistribute — the sources ask that of us, and each one’s terms are named. Machine-readable: entries.json carries this record under the id omr:kr:a-cosmetic-may-not-look-like-food, with the same evidence and falsifier.

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