04 — 철학 The atelier
Beauty kept, not worn.
A short account of who we are, why we work this way, and what we believe skin actually needs.
Beauty in the Joseon tradition was rarely worn. It was kept — through diet, through stillness, through the regulation of small daily acts. The skin was understood as a record of the body's inner climate, and care for it was care for the whole person.
The Joseon period (1392–1897) produced one of the most extensive medical literatures in East Asia. The Donguibogam, compiled by Heo Jun in 1613, runs to twenty-five volumes; it remains in use in Korean hanbang clinics today. Among its many concerns is the appearance of skin — not as a problem to be solved, but as a window onto digestion, circulation, sleep, the regulation of qi.
This is the lineage we work from. Soonji is not a wellness brand and not a clinical brand. It is a continuation of an understanding: that what shows on the surface is the visible portion of something deeper, and that care for the surface alone is, eventually, a waste of time.
We work with practitioners of hanbang — Korean herbal medicine — to formulate skincare that respects the slow logic of the body. Nothing in our formulations is included for novelty. Everything has been used, in one form or another, for centuries. The ingredients are not exotic; they are familiar. What may be new is the care with which they are extracted, the discipline of the formulation, the small batch sizes.
We make a small range. We make it carefully. We assume you have time.
— Soonji, Seoul
The Atelier아틀리에
Jongno, since 2018.
Our studio is on the second floor of a converted ceramicist's workshop in the Jaedong neighborhood. It is small. We have ten employees. We have no plans to grow much beyond this.
i.
Each formulation is mixed by hand, in batches of no more than 400 units. The bench in the photograph is original to the building — over a century old, refinished once.
ii.
Most of our ingredients arrive in the spring and autumn harvest windows. We hold inventory for a full year — long enough to taste each season's character before we use it.
iii.
Roots and shoots are dried, fermented, or pressed within the studio. We import equipment only when it is necessary; otherwise we use methods that have not meaningfully changed in a generation.
Our Practitioners한의사
Three people we work with.
Hanbang practitioners do not generally lend their names to skincare brands. The three below have, after a long time of being asked, agreed to consult on our formulations.
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i.
Master Park Hyo-jin 박효진
Hanbang clinician, Seoul (forty years' practice)
Trained at Kyung Hee University. Operates a clinic in Jongno specializing in skin and digestive conditions. Has consulted on every Soonji formulation since 2018. Interviewed in our journal.
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ii.
Dr. Yoon Ji-ho 윤지호
Botanical chemist, Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine
Studies extraction methods for traditional Korean botanicals. Advises on our fermentation protocols, particularly the houttuynia cold-ferment described elsewhere on the site.
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iii.
Han Mi-rye 한미려
Camellia oil presser, Hyeopjae village (Jeju)
Head of the haenyeo women's cooperative that presses our camellia oil. Her grandmother taught her the practice; she is teaching her granddaughter. We buy from her on a one-year contract, renewed each January.
A note on scale
We are not trying to be large.
A question we are asked often: how big does Soonji want to be? The honest answer is, not much bigger than we are now. We make six objects. We sell them, by direct order and through eleven stockists, to a few thousand customers a year. We employ ten people in Jongno and contract with growers across six provinces. The work is manageable; the quality is reliable; the people who work here are paid well and stay for a long time.
Growth at the cost of any of these things would be a step backwards. We would rather wait.
— S.
Read More
Long-form, occasionally.
Interviews, harvest reports, meditations on skin and time.
Visit the journal