Korean beauty prices 29% below US-origin peers

History

1. v6correctedAugust 5, 2026

   Correction. The retirement recorded above was an operator error, not a finding. The derivation was run against collector run commerce-20260805053004 while that crawl was still in flight and had reached 4 of 66 storefronts, so every claim whose storefronts it had not yet read failed its sample gate and was retired. 44 claims were retired in one command for that reason. The claim was re-derived the same day from collector run commerce-20260805051110, a complete 66 of 66 crawl, and holds. Nothing about the market changed between the two records. The retirement stays in this log because the log is not edited; this entry is what it means. The instrument now refuses to derive from a run missing more than a tenth of the seeded storefronts, and a claim returning from retired now files its own status revision, which is why this correction had to be written by hand rather than appearing on its own.

2. v5retiredAugust 5, 2026

   Retired against collector run commerce-20260805053004: sample too thin (KR 2, US 0; need 6 and 4). The claim held on the sample available when it was written and does not hold on this one.

   What it said before

   Korean beauty brands selling into the United States sit below their US-origin peers on price: a median storefront price of $22 across 19 Korean-origin storefronts against $31 across 18 US-origin storefronts, a gap of 29%.

3. v4correctedAugust 5, 2026

   Re-derived from collector run commerce-20260805015420; figures moved.

   What it said before

   Korean beauty brands selling into the United States sit below their US-origin peers on price: a median storefront price of $22 across 19 Korean-origin storefronts against $31 across 20 US-origin storefronts, a gap of 29%.

   Note added August 5, 2026

   The revision above is labelled as a re-derivation and it was more than that. Between the previous run and this one the collector was changed: four storefronts that had been counted as brands are retailers, and a retailer's catalogue is other companies' product copy. Soko Glam is a US company whose 601 products are Korean, which made it the largest single catalogue in the US-origin group and put Korean listings inside the control set for every origin comparison. Those four are now held out of both origin groups, which is why the storefront counts in this sentence fell without the crawl reaching fewer sites. The run also re-crawled, so any part of the change that came from the market rather than from the fix cannot be separated out here. The earlier figure was wrong when we published it, not merely out of date, and the correction moves every corridor gap in the same direction: the contaminated control understated all of them. Recorded after the fact because the run was not tagged as a methodology change at the time, which was our error and not a limit of the record.

4. v3correctedAugust 5, 2026

   Re-derived from collector run commerce-20260805005712; figures moved.

   What it said before

   Korean beauty brands selling into the United States sit below their US-origin peers on price: a median storefront price of $22.5 across 18 Korean-origin storefronts against $31 across 20 US-origin storefronts, a gap of 27%.

5. v2correctedAugust 4, 2026

   Re-derived from collector run commerce-20260804223321; figures moved.

   What it said before

   Korean beauty brands selling into the United States sit below their US-origin peers on price: a median storefront price of $24 across 13 Korean-origin storefronts against $29 across 7 US-origin storefronts, a gap of 17%.

6. v1createdAugust 4, 2026

   Derived from collector run commerce-20260804203300.

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.