Korean Beauty Batch Codes: The Manufacture Date, Printed Plainly

Korea's regulator requires the manufacture date (제조) on cosmetic packaging. Manufacturers comply by printing it, and their batch codes generally lead with the same date rather than encoding it — as YYYYMMDD, YYMMDD, or occasionally YYMM followed by a line letter.

So a K-beauty code is usually not a code at all. It is a date, in the order the rest of the world writes dates, with a letter stuck on the end.

Many Korean packs also print the date in plain text next to the 제조 marking, or print a 까지 ("until") date, which is an expiry rather than a manufacture date. If both appear, the 까지 date is the one to trust.

• Eight leading digits: read them as year, month, day — 20260118 is 18 January 2026.
• Six leading digits: two-digit year, month, day — 231122 is 22 November 2023.
• Any trailing letters are the production line. Ignore them.

On the bottom of the tube or jar, on the crimp, or on the back of the carton — often alongside the 제조 label. Korean packaging is generally more forthcoming about dates than Western packaging, which is one reason K-beauty is easy to buy safely second-hand.