EVALUATING COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS IN POST MARKET SURVEILLANCE OF SOUTH KOREA'S COSMETICS INDUSTRY

Abstract

South Korea's cosmetics industry grew rapidly to USD 13.1 billion in domestic sales and USD 10.3 billion in exports by 2023, but post-market surveillance (PMS) has not kept pace with the risks this growth creates. Using three years of South Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) data (2021–2023), five enforcement case studies, and an original Communication Effectiveness Index (CEI), this study evaluated whether safety information generated by enforcement actually reaches consumers. Enforcement performance improved substantially over the period: recall rates rose from 15.2% to 24.1%, and inspection turnaround shortened from 42 to 33 days. Yet the CEI revealed a 45-point communication gap between regulators (75) and consumers (30), with manufacturers (55) and healthcare professionals (49) falling in between. This gap, not enforcement capacity, is the central constraint: consumers remained nearly as exposed to risk information failures even as MFDS's technical performance strengthened. The five case studies illustrate how this breakdown occurs in practice, particularly where digital and influencer-driven sales channels outpace regulatory communication. The findings suggest that closing South Korea's cosmetics-safety gap requires investment in how risk information is delivered to consumers, not only in how violations are detected and enforced.