Two products, made for one person's skin.
The word “Parang” means “blue” in Korean, a color that embodies calmness and serenity.
The search
"She tried over 100 products. But nothing worked."
— Hongmyoung Kim, founder
The founder's daughter has skin that reacts to almost everything, including the ingredients everyone agrees are the gentle ones. Her search for something she could keep using went on for ten years. A hundred products came and went in that time, most of them abandoned somewhere between week one and week three.
Her father is not a marketer. He watched that go on for a decade and eventually did the only useful thing left, which was to stop looking for a product and start building one.
Two came out of it, after years of research and testing: a serum and a cream. The next gentle products are already in development.
What we left out
Most of the work went into subtraction.
No added fragrance, because fragrance is the single most common reason a product gets abandoned by people with reactive skin, and because a scent has never made anyone's skin better. No parabens, no silicones, no mineral oils, no dyes, no PEG.
The ingredient lists are short on purpose. A short list is not automatically a better formula, but it does something a long one cannot: when something does go wrong, you have a chance of working out what caused it. Anyone who has spent years narrowing down their own triggers knows how much that is worth.
What is left is the part that does the work. PHA, papain and yuzu in the serum, with centella, panthenol, allantoin, aloe and peptides alongside them. Panthenol and snow mushroom in the cream, with rice bran water, allantoin and aloe. Every one of them is listed in full on the Ingredients page, in the order they appear in the formula.
How they're made
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.
How we check
- primary skin irritation patch test
- Finn Chamber
- 24-hour occlusion
- read by a dermatologist
Both products went through a primary skin irritation patch test: Finn Chamber, 24-hour occlusion, read by a dermatologist. Both scored 0.00 and were rated "No irritation (Excellent)." The certificates are numbered HM-IR0084-76 for the serum and HM-IR0084-75 for the cream.
We are careful about how far we take that number. A patch test is a result on a test panel under controlled conditions. It is not a promise about your face, and anyone who tells you a test result is a promise is selling you something. What it does tell you is that the formula was checked by someone independent before it was sold, which is more than a short ingredient list on its own can say.
The Calm Skin Project
The part we cannot do on our own is find out how these two products behave on skin that is not the founder's daughter's.
The Calm Skin Project is how we are doing that. Sixty-five people with sensitive or reactive skin receive full-size Parang Blue skincare, free, and post one honest video in return. No script, 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.
If that sounds like your skin and your kind of review, the details are on the project page.