The Founder's Story: 100 Products, 10 Years, and a Daughter's Skin
Parang Blue started with one person: the founder's daughter, whose skin reacted to almost everything. After ten years and over a hundred products, her father built two of his own.
Parang Blue is a Korean skincare brand for sensitive skin with two products, the 2PY Serum and the Hydrasnow Cream. It was started by founder Hongmyoung Kim for his daughter, whose skin reacted to almost everything she tried, including the ingredients usually described as gentle. "Parang" means "blue" in Korean, a color that stands for calm.
Most brand stories begin with a market. This one begins with a drawer full of half-used bottles.
The search
"She tried over 100 products. But nothing worked."
Hongmyoung Kim, founder
The founder's daughter has skin that reacts to almost everything. That includes the ingredients everyone agrees are the gentle ones. Her search for something she could keep using went on for ten years. More than a hundred products came and went in that time, most of them abandoned somewhere between week one and week three.
If you have reactive skin, you probably recognize the shape of that decade. The hopeful first few days. The slow realization around the end of the first week. The bottle that goes into the back of the drawer, mostly full.
You may also recognize what it does to the way you shop. After enough of those bottles, the front of the box stops meaning anything. "Gentle" turns out to be a marketing word more often than a formulation one. You start reading the back instead, learning which ingredients to be suspicious of, and keeping a mental list of what went wrong and when.
That habit, reading the back of the box, is the one this brand was built for.
A father, not a marketer
Her father is not a marketer. He watched that search go on for ten years, and eventually he did the only useful thing left: he stopped looking for a product and started building one.
Two came out of it, after years of research and testing. A serum and a cream. Not a twelve-piece line, not a different product for every concern. Two products, made for one person's skin first. Every decision about them started from a simple test: would she be able to keep using this, week after week, without it ending up in the drawer with the others?
The next gentle products are in development. They will be held to the same standard.
The name came from the same place. "Parang" is the Korean word for blue, the color most of us associate with calm. For a family that spent ten years looking for products that would leave one person's skin alone, it was the obvious word to put on the label.
What the search taught
A decade of trial and error teaches you things a product brief never would. Three of them shaped both formulas.
Leave out anything that does not earn its place. No added fragrance, because fragrance is one of the most common reasons a product gets abandoned by people with reactive skin, and a scent has never made anyone's skin better. No parabens, silicones, mineral oils, dyes or PEG either. We went through each of those in What Is Not in the Bottle.
Keep the list short enough to read. A short list is not automatically a better formula. But when something goes wrong, it gives you a chance of working out why. After years of narrowing down triggers, that matters more than any single ingredient.
Check before you sell. Both products went through a primary skin irritation patch test: Finn Chamber method, 24-hour occlusion, read by a dermatologist. Both scored 0.00 and were rated "No irritation (Excellent)" (Cert. HM-IR0084-76 for the serum, HM-IR0084-75 for the cream). That is a result on a test panel under controlled conditions, not a prediction about your skin. It does tell you someone independent checked the formulas first.
Two products, one routine
The result is a two-step routine.
| Step | Product | Built around |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2PY Serum, 50 ml | PHA, papain and yuzu, with a calming cica group |
| 2 | Hydrasnow Cream, 60 ml | Panthenol and snow mushroom, with rice bran water |
The two were made as a pair because the founder's daughter needed both steps. You can read how they fit together in The Two-Step Routine.
Made in Korea, made to order. Both products are made in Korea, and they are manufactured to order rather than produced in bulk and warehoused. That is slower, and it means we sometimes sell out. In the US, Parang Blue is sold by Nutramins Inc of Norwalk, California.
Testing it beyond one person
The part a family cannot do alone is find out how two products behave on skin that is not the founder's daughter's. That is what The Calm Skin Project is for. Sixty-five people in the US with sensitive or reactive skin receive full-size Parang Blue skincare for free and post one honest video in return. There is no script and no approval round, and a negative take is a legitimate outcome. Videos are disclosed as #gifted, which the FTC requires and which we would want anyway.
Why ask for honest videos rather than polished ones? Because the brand began with one person's skin, and one person's skin is not a sample. The only way to learn how these formulas behave on a wider range of reactive skin is to let people with that skin try them and say what they actually found, including when the answer is "not for me."
Quick answers
Who founded Parang Blue?
Parang Blue was founded by Hongmyoung Kim, who built the brand's first two products for his daughter after a ten-year search in which she tried over a hundred products without finding ones her skin could keep using.
What does "Parang" mean?
"Parang" means "blue" in Korean, a color associated with calmness and serenity.
Where are Parang Blue products made?
Both products are made in Korea and manufactured to order. They are sold in the US by Nutramins Inc of Norwalk, California.
Start where she did
Shop The Two-Step Set, the serum and the cream together for $35.90, or read more on our About page.
