Honey and Propolis in Beauty

Start at the cooking pot and the tea cup. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture traces honey in Korea to a mention in the Samguk sagi for Silla, and says it sweetens traditional confections such as yumilgwa (the fried pastry also known as yakgwa), yaksik and dasik. Stirred into water it makes a drink, kkulmul. The same encyclopedia's Dano entry describes a cool summer drink, jeho-tang, mixed with honey. Most honey on the market is Western-bee honey named for its flower, such as acacia, chestnut or buckwheat, and the rarer honey of the native bee is called tojongkkul. Details are on the honey page, and the story of honey-sweetened court sweets is in hangwa.

Honey as a compliment

Kkul has also become a word for “excellent.” A 2023 Korean newspaper article lists kkul-tip (a really useful tip), kkul-jikjang (a dream workplace) and kkul-pibu (“honey skin”) among new words formed from that extended sense. The beauty term is older than the latest social-media wave: a Jaekyung Ilbo entertainment article from December 2009 listed kkul-pibu among three beauty buzzwords of the year, defining it as clear, blemish-free skin with a moist glow, as if honey had been spread over it, skin you want to touch. It named well-known actors as examples. The idiom describes how skin looks. It is not a claim that honey was used to get it.

Honey and hair in the older record

The traditional record on grooming points to the hive rather than the jar: the encyclopedia's hair-oil entry describes mil-gireum, a beeswax pomade made from the wax left after the honey is extracted, applied with a small spatula-like tool to hold side hair in place. That is a hair product made from wax, not a honey treatment. I did not find a documented Korean tradition of honey face masks in the sources reviewed. See also traditional hair care.

Evidence status: be precise

Three things get mixed up, so they are separated here.

• Honey as a wound dressing. A 2015 Cochrane review pooled 26 randomized or quasi-randomized trials with 3,011 people. For partial-thickness burns, honey healed about 4.7 days faster than conventional dressings (high certainty, two trials, 992 people), and it was similar to silver sulfadiazine for healing within six weeks, with fewer adverse events. Evidence for most other wound types was low or very low certainty, and for several, such as venous leg ulcers and diabetic foot ulcers, the answer was unclear. The review's searches ran to October 2014.
• Medical-grade versus pantry honey. In a 2009 laboratory comparison in WOUNDS, 18 supermarket honeys were tested against one sterile, irradiated medical-grade manuka honey. The table honeys contained a wide range of microbes, including Bacillus species in 14 samples, and generally had weaker antibacterial activity. The authors argued that non-sterile honey should not be used on wounds. The study was funded by a company that sells a honey wound product. Wound evidence concerns sterile dressings used under clinical care; it does not turn a jar of table honey into a skin treatment.
• Cosmetic honey. A 2013 review in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology describes honey in cosmetic formulations as an emollient, humectant, soothing and hair-conditioning ingredient, used at amounts of roughly 1 to 10 percent. Describing what an ingredient does in a formula is not the same as showing a measured benefit on skin.

Propolis

Propolis, the resin bees use to seal the hive, is sold in creams and ampoules. A 2017 systematic review of external propolis pooled 12 randomized trials (862 people) across oral, skin and genital conditions. Its authors called the evidence not conclusive because the studies were small and methodologically weak, and said it was insufficient to draw conclusions about safety. Only three of the 12 studies reported adverse events.

Considerations

• Honey must never be given to infants under one year, as covered on the honey page.
• People allergic to bee products should check with a clinician before using honey or propolis cosmetics; adverse-event reporting in the propolis trials was sparse.
• A wound that needs care needs a clinician, not a kitchen jar.