The Sunscreen That Went Viral Started With a 200-Year-Old Book
Somewhere in your TikTok feed over the past few years, you've almost certainly scrolled past a sunscreen tube with a name that sounds like it belongs in a history museum. Beauty of Joseon has become one of the most recognizable K-beauty brands in the world largely on the strength of a single product, but the story behind the name goes back further than a marketing team could invent. It starts with a woman named Yi Bingheogak, writing during an era when women in Korea had almost no access to formal education or publishing.
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| This brand built a visual identity that makes traditional Korean medicine look like contemporary luxury. |
An Encyclopedia Written by a Woman With No Right to Write One
Two hundred years ago, Yi Bingheogak compiled the Gyuhap Chongseo, an encyclopedia covering cooking, household management, medicine, and beauty, all filtered through hanbang, the traditional Korean medicine system built around herbal remedies and holistic balance. It wasn't a vanity project. It was a practical guide meant to genuinely improve the daily lives of the women who read it, written by someone who had no formal standing to publish anything at all.
Founder Sumin Lee has talked openly about how personally that book resonated with her, partly because hanbang wasn't abstract history in her own life either. Her mother saved rice-rinsing water to use as a face wash and mixed rice powder with honey for breakouts, the same category of remedy the Gyuhap Chongseo documented centuries earlier. Beauty of Joseon, relaunched under Lee's direction around 2019, was built on a fairly direct premise: take that inherited knowledge seriously, run it through modern formulation science, and sell the result at a price that doesn't treat heritage as a luxury markup.
Then One Sunscreen Changed Everything
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| The Relief Sun went viral not because of the branding, but because the formula spoke for itself. |
Around 2022 and 2023, the Relief Sun Rice and Probiotics SPF50+ took off on TikTok in a way that had nothing to do with a coordinated campaign. Sumin Lee has described the virality as organic, and the numbers back that up: hashtags connected to the brand accumulated hundreds of millions of views, driven almost entirely by ordinary users filming their own reaction to a texture they weren't expecting from a sunscreen.
That reaction makes more sense once you understand what American sunscreen culture had trained people to expect. Thick, chalky, white-casting formulas had convinced a huge number of people that skipping SPF was simply less unpleasant than wearing it. The Relief Sun absorbed in seconds, left no white residue, and sat invisibly under makeup, which is a genuinely different sensory experience for anyone whose only reference point was a drugstore sunscreen aisle. The formula's rice ferment base handled hydration and a subtle brightening effect, while its probiotic complex supported the skin's microbiome over time rather than just blocking UV for the day. People weren't filming a marketing claim. They were filming their own surprise.
The Ingredients Are Older Than the Brand's TikTok Fame by Centuries
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| Rice bran, ginseng, and rice water: ingredients centuries older than the brand itself. |
What separates Beauty of Joseon from a lot of brands riding a single viral moment is that the ingredient logic underneath the Relief Sun isn't new. Rice, ginseng, and green plum all appear throughout the hanbang tradition the brand draws its entire identity from, documented in texts like the Gyuhap Chongseo and the Donguibogam long before anyone had a formulation lab. Ginseng shows up across the line for its antioxidant properties, rice bran for hydration and brightening, and green plum extract for gentle exfoliation, essentially a five-hundred-year-old description of what modern chemistry now calls chemical exfoliation.
That continuity is part of why the brand's success feels earned rather than manufactured. The story isn't "we invented something new and gave it an old-sounding name for flavor." It's closer to "these ingredients already worked, and we finally built formulas precise enough to prove it."
What Success Actually Cost the Brand in the US Market
Going viral in America came with a real formulation problem most viral K-beauty brands eventually run into. The FDA hasn't approved a new sunscreen UV filter since 1999, which means the advanced Korean filters responsible for the Relief Sun's original lightweight feel simply aren't legally available for sale in the United States. Rather than quietly shipping an inferior product to their biggest new market, Beauty of Joseon spent real development time building a separate US-specific formula, eventually releasing the Daily Relief Sunscreen using the more limited filters American regulation allows, still keeping the price around eighteen dollars rather than repositioning as a premium import.
That decision, absorbing the cost of a dedicated reformulation instead of cutting corners, is a quieter part of the brand's story than the viral videos, but it's arguably the more important one. It's the difference between a brand that got lucky once and a brand built to survive its own success. Beauty of Joseon's real lesson for anyone watching K-beauty's global rise is simple: a two-hundred-year-old idea can absolutely go viral on TikTok, but only if the formula underneath it is honest enough to survive the attention.
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