Green Tea in Korean Beauty

Green tea (nokcha, 녹차) is the best-known tea grown in Korea (Korean tea culture, traditional teas). It is a drink of quiet occasions, and in spring a newly harvested tea is traditionally paired with mugwort rice cake (mugwort).

Boseong and Jeju

Two places stand behind much Korean green tea. In Boseong, in South Jeolla, Korea JoongAng Daily reports that commercial-scale tea farming began with the Daehan Plantation in 1939, that the plantation was bought and revived in 1957, and that the county today has about 1,300 tea farms covering roughly 1,048 hectares and producing about 40 percent of the nation's green tea. Picking runs from late April into late August. On Jeju, a large Korean cosmetics-and-tea company began a green tea business in 1979 and, according to the Korea Times, turned rocky, thorny land into about 33 square kilometers of tea fields producing roughly a quarter of the country's tea.

From the cup to the cream

The connection to beauty is chemistry. Green tea is rich in polyphenols called catechins, and the most studied is epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG. Cosmetic makers market green tea extract as an antioxidant ingredient for cleansers, toners, creams and masks. What do studies show?

What the research shows

Green tea has been studied for skin more than most ingredients in this section, but most of the work is in cells or animals, and the human evidence is mixed.

• Mostly preclinical. A 2024 review of EGCG and skin photoaging tallied the studies in its main table: 16 of 18 were in cells or animals, and the 2 human studies used green tea taken by mouth. The review cites no human trial of EGCG applied to the skin.
• Oral tea, small trials. The human trials in that review enrolled between 10 and 60 people and lasted 12 weeks or less. Two similar 12-week trials of green tea extract with vitamin C disagreed on markers of UV-related inflammation.
• Oral versus topical. A 2022 systematic review of 12 studies on oral green tea concluded that clinical evidence supported only oral preparations for protecting skin from UV damage, and found conflicting results for other uses. It excluded 32 papers on topical use by design. Among topical trials it mentions, one tested 1% and 5% EGCG on 35 people with acne for 8 weeks, and a study combining a 10% green tea cream with supplements in 40 women reported skin irritation, which the authors attributed to too high a concentration.
• Practical limits. The 2024 review notes that EGCG is unstable: sunlight, heat and pH can degrade it, and its large molecules cross the skin barrier poorly.

So the honest summary is that green tea is a well-studied antioxidant in the laboratory, but benefits to human skin from cosmetics have not been firmly established by large, well-controlled trials.

Cautions

• Patch-test green tea products, especially concentrated extracts, since a study above that used a strong cream reported irritation.
• Skin care is not a replacement for sun protection. See sunscreen culture.
• Brewed tea is not the same as a cosmetic extract. The studies above did not test leftover tea on the face.

Enjoy green tea first as what it is: a calm ritual of the Korean table. Whether it helps your skin is a smaller claim than its flavor deserves.