Master Park's office occupies the second floor of a building behind the Jogyesa temple in Jongno-gu, Seoul. The stairs are narrow and the door is unmarked. Inside, a single window opens onto an alley; a brass kettle sits on a portable burner; against the back wall, a wooden chest holds, in twenty-four drawers, the standard pharmacopeia of Korean herbal medicine.
He has been practicing for forty years. He is sixty-seven, with the slow movements and unhurried face of a man who has never once been late to anything. When I arrive, ten minutes ahead of our appointment, he is boiling water in the kettle and arranging four small porcelain cups on a tray. We will drink tea together for an hour before he answers any question I have brought. This is, he tells me later, the appointment.
I.
Master Park trained at Kyung Hee University in the mid-1980s, when Korean traditional medicine was just beginning a long, uneven process of state recognition. He completed the standard six-year curriculum and an additional three years of clinical residency at a hospital in Daegu. He has run his own practice since 1992. He has, in that time, seen perhaps fifty thousand patients.
"Most of the people who come to me come for skin," he says. "It used not to be this way. When I started, the most common complaint was digestion — and digestion remains the most common cause. But the language people use to describe their problem has changed. They say I am breaking out; they do not say I have eaten badly. The skin is the door they choose to knock on. So I begin there."
He pours a second cup. The tea is mugwort, picked from Ganghwa Island, the same source we use for two of our formulations. He confirms this when I tell him; he confirms it without surprise.
"The skin is the slowest organ to forgive. The liver will recover in a week. The gut will recover in a fortnight. The skin remembers for a year, sometimes longer. This is why it is a poor place to attempt repair, and a useful place to attempt patience."
What he means by this is not literal — the skin does, of course, complete its full cycle in roughly twenty-eight days. What he means is that the visible markers of poor sleep, poor digestion, poor regulation of stress: these settle in the skin and remain there long after the underlying cause has resolved. A bad month in November will still be visible in February. A truly settled year is rare; he has seen it only a handful of times.
II.
We turn, then, to the practice itself — what he believes a daily skincare routine should look like, and how that has changed over the course of his career.
"In the eighties and nineties," he says, "Korean women used very little. Soap, water, a single oil. The complaints were straightforward, mostly internal. In the 2000s the practice expanded — a toner, a serum, an ampoule, a cream, a sleeping mask, an eye treatment. By the late 2010s I was seeing patients who used twelve products at night. Their digestion was sometimes worse than the patients of twenty years before. Their skin was almost always worse."
He attributes this not to any single ingredient or product, but to a general failure of attention. "When you do a thing in twelve steps, you cannot do any of the steps well. You are thinking about the next step the entire time. It is the same with eating. It is the same with sleeping. The number of steps is a measure of how distracted you are."
His own daily practice is brief. He cleanses with a soft soap once daily, in the evening. He uses an oil — usually camellia — to massage his face after rinsing. He applies a single fermented essence and a single cream, both formulated by his own clinic for his own patients. He uses sunscreen in summer; he skips it in winter, except on snow days. He goes to bed by ten and rises at five.
"This is not a recommendation for everyone," he says. "It is an example of how few steps a sufficient practice can have. Most of my patients do more than this. Most should do less."
III.
I ask him about hanbang skincare specifically — the new generation of Korean brands, including ours, that have begun to draw on traditional formularies. He is measured in his response.
"It is good and it is dangerous," he says. "Good because it brings the work of the practitioners to people who would not otherwise see us. Dangerous because the formularies are not lists of ingredients — they are sets of relationships. Ginseng with mugwort is different from ginseng with houttuynia. The traditional formulas were not arbitrary; they were tested across centuries. Pulling one ingredient out of context and putting it in a serum bottle is not, in itself, hanbang. It is marketing."
What separates a real continuation of the tradition, in his view, is the willingness to consult the broader system. "If you make a serum with ginseng and you do not also ask what the customer is eating, what time they sleep, whether their stomach is warm or cold — you are making a product. Which is fine. But it is not hanbang. Hanbang is the conversation around the product."
He does not say this as a criticism of any specific brand. He says it the way a teacher says a thing — as a fact for the student to weigh.
IV.
At the end of our two hours together, I ask him what he tells patients who come to him asking what to do about their skin, in summary, in one sentence.
He thinks about this for a long time. Long enough that the tea in our cups goes cold.
"I tell them," he says, "to do less, eat warmer, sleep earlier, and stop watching their face."
This is, of course, the kind of answer that sounds simpler than it is. The last clause is the difficult one. To stop watching the face — to stop interpreting every passing redness, every late-night blemish, every grey morning's tiredness as a problem requiring intervention — is the entire practice. It is also the most consistent thing the practitioners we know have said. Master Park's version is the most direct.
We finish our tea. He shows me the wooden chest with the twenty-four drawers; he tells me which season each is opened in. I leave at a quarter to five. The light in Jongno at that hour, in late spring, is the kind of light that makes the alleyways look briefly the same as they would have looked in 1985. The boiling water; the mugwort tea; the man who has not been late to anything in forty years. The slow practice of caring for skin.
— S.L.
Jongno, Seoul. April 2026.
