What an Olive Young "#1" Actually Measures

The people who trust that label most are, according to someone who works there, the ones from outside the market.

The Most Upvoted Comment Was a Question

Buying Korean skincare for the first time, you have almost nothing to go on. You do not know the brands, the ingredient lists are in Korean, and the reviews read like machine translation. So you reach for the shelf tag that says #1.

Under one Korean review video, the most upvoted comment is this: I have never understood why that one is always #1. It has 2,114 likes. Below it the same thing keeps appearing. The #1 cleansing oil — it never actually cleared my blackheads or oil. I genuinely do not get why it is #1. I have always wondered whether the #1 product is really worth being #1.

And then one more. From someone who identifies as an Olive Young employee. This might be specific to where I work since we get a lot of foreign customers, but nine out of ten people buying the #1 items are foreigners who saw them on social media. Korean customers almost never buy them. One store, and they flagged that themselves. Still, something is left standing — the people who trust that tag most are the ones from outside the market.

The person who made the video is a Korean beauty creator who has been reviewing cosmetics for years. Not a dermatologist, not an industry insider. What she did here is the unusual part. She went to the retailer's site, sorted by sales, and scraped the bottom. One #1 and one last-place product per category, bought as pairs, judged side by side.

The first line of her description reads this video contains no paid promotion whatsoever, and in the video she says it again: I am not going to worry about any brand's feelings, so brand managers can leave now. She paid for the last-place products too, which is the condition that makes the video possible — nobody sends you their worst seller.

Her opening question is the spine of the whole thing. Are the #1 products #1 because they are good, or because of marketing? And are the last-place products last because they are worse?

The search data explains why that question matters now. In the US, korean skincare products gets about 135,000 searches a month and korean skincare brands about 90,500 — and both are down year over year. Over the same period, individual brand names exploded. One is up 385,100%. The traffic moved from the broad terms to brand names, and those brands are mostly the ones on the top shelf.

The Four Rules She Set Before Judging Anything

Before any of the comparisons, she did one thing. She set four rules.

① The ranking does not count. #1 or last, they get judged in the same place.

② No brand halo. Recognizing a name does not earn it points.

③ No judging by appearance. She calls this the most important one — I am not going to say "well obviously this is last, look at it, I do not even want to use it."

④ She states whose skin this is. Before any verdict, she says it is her skin making the call.

The fourth one matters most. Every judgment that follows came out of one person's skin, and she does not hide that. Which lets you weigh each verdict against your own conditions instead of taking it flat.

The sampling method is just as plain. Sort by sales, take the bottom. One #1 and one last-place per category. Thirteen pairs.

The premise is buried in that method. The ranking is a sales ranking. Not an order products earned by passing a quality review — an order of how many units moved. So #1 means sold the most and last means sold the least, and where quality sits between those two is something nobody has actually checked.

Checking it thirteen times is what this video is.

What the Number 300,000 Turned Out to Be

Opening them up, one category snagged. The last-place serum.

That product listed one active at 300,000 ppm. Look up the well-known products using the same active and the declared figures run around 100, 6,800, 10,000. Almost nothing clears ten thousand — and this one says three hundred thousand. Discounted, it cost about 20,000 won. She says she got excited: this was going straight into the recommendation.

Then she read the full ingredient list. And found what the number was. The 300,000 ppm was not that active. It was the amount of a "complex" containing that active. A complex is a blend; if some fraction of it is the active, the whole blend can carry the name. You can load it with other things, put a little of the active in, and the label still works.

So she went looking for the standalone figure. Someone had already asked the same question in the retailer's Q&A, and the answer had a number in it. 2,000 ppm.

Three hundred thousand, and two thousand. Her verdict ended there — this one does not need judging, it is disqualified. And she adds a line: read the reviews and you find people saying I use this because it has the highest concentration. It does not. Products with more of the actual active are sitting in the same store.

The comments answered that stretch. I wish they would stop playing games with ingredient marketing. Thank you for this. 2,114 likes went to the opening question; this one got 640.

This is the only judgment in the whole video with no taste in it. Everything else carries the my skin caveat. Between a declared 300,000 and a confirmed 2,000, there is nothing to have an opinion about.

The Things That Outrank the Ingredient List

And the ingredient list is not the only measure either. In three of the thirteen categories, something upstream of the ingredients decided it.

Sheet masks — the sheet. By ingredients, the last-place one actually had more. But the #1 used a soft, wet-wipe-like sheet, and the other used a nonwoven fabric that felt like a mask from twenty years ago. Her ruling is blunt: with sheet masks, no matter how good the ingredients are, the sheet is what matters — you do not even need to look at the list. #1 wins.

Toner — the bottle. The last-place toner's sprayer only reached one side of the face and took real finger strength to work. But poured onto a cotton pad it was good — calming, cooling, and makeup sat better afterward. The liquid was doing its job; the container was in the way. Her note: please, just release this as a pad.

Pads — her own chemistry. A soothing active in the #1 pad did not agree with her. It itched, stung and went red on contact. She does not record that as a flaw in the product — other people say this makes their skin soft and calms everything down. The same product split by person, and a ranking cannot hold that split.

Three Ways a #1 Loses

Because #1 does lose. Three ways, and the first is chemistry.

By ingredient list, the #1 toner looks mild. It looks like water and appears to contain very little. But there is an exfoliating active in there, and on reactive skin that stings. The last-place one contained far more — tea scent, fruit scent, everything they could add. And it did not sting. Her closing line on that category: no irritation, and for reactive skin like mine that is what actually matters. Once something stings, you never know when your skin will turn, and you get scared to use it.

A ranking cannot count that. A ranking counts what sold to many people, not what happens on your face.

The second is time.

The #1 sunscreen has held that position for three or four years, she says. And she used to wear it daily and no longer does. Not because it got worse. It was the original of the moisturizer-textured sunscreen. When it came out it was a revelation. Since then the format flooded the market, and sun serums arrived — lighter still, almost no oil. So it fell behind.

The #1 cleansing oil went the same way. She used it for years, then stopped because it was too thick and left her face feeling heavy — and because thinner, fresher oils with the same cleansing power had since appeared. In that category the last-place product won: an oil with the consistency of water, effective and light. Its flaw was an artificial fragrance that stayed through the rinse. Two products with obvious flaws, and the one judging is sensitive to scent, so she picked accordingly and said so.

Which means a product's presence in the ranking is not a claim about the present. It was the best once, and name recognition and repeat purchases can hold the slot. A comment puts it in four words: famous for being famous.

The third is reasons that have nothing to do with the product. Colour cosmetics made this clearest.

The #1 cushion covered impressively on contact. But she watched it cause heavy darkening on friends with under-eye circles — not on her, but she saw it happen. The last-place one had a natural shade and a bad puff. Her verdict for the pair: both were terrible.

The #1 eyeshadow palette had serious fallout and dull payoff. So why is it #1? She asked people who use it constantly, and got this: there is basically no shade in it you would not use. Not the quality of any single colour — a set with nothing wasted in it. A usefulness ranking, not a quality ranking.

The #1 lip product has been the same shade at the top for years. The colour is genuinely nice; by her judgment, there are plenty with better shine and better texture. And of the last-place one she wrote: I think people just do not know about this — if it got known it could beat the #1.

The powder is the odd one: the #1 won and she still would not recommend it. It does make skin look far smoother. But the scent stayed on her face after application.

One thing has to sit beside all of this. Under rule ④, these are one person's verdicts, and the comments carry the opposite too. The #1 serum genuinely is a #1 for me — it does not just add water, it balances oil and water together. And another line settles it: everyone has their own match.

Where the Question Shifts From What Is #1 to What Got Counted

After thirteen head-to-heads, the results did not tilt.

• #1 won, seven — cream · sheet mask (on the sheet) · sunscreen · cleansing oil (on fragrance) · under-eye pencil · blush (barely) · powder (won, not recommended)
• Last place won, four — toner · eyeshadow · lip · lash curler
• Split, three — pads (chemistry) · cushion (both bad) · lip balm (both good)
• Disqualified, one — the last-place serum, on the label

Across fifteen matchups, the worst seller took four. And in three more, the #1 was not the answer either.

Her closing note is not an attack on the #1s. There were so many products in the last-place column that I had never heard of, which made it fun — and a lot of them were genuinely good. And she adds: you have probably already tried the #1s, and almost nobody is using the ones at the bottom.

So the question changes. Not what is #1, but what that ranking counted.

The answer is already in the method. A ranking counts units sold, and units sold tracks times seen. And if the person working the floor is right, the people trusting that tag most are the ones who came from outside the market.

None of which means avoid the #1s. Seven of fifteen went to them. It means #1 is not an answer — it is one data point. Whether your skin is reactive, what actually decides results in that category, how many years that product has held the slot: put those beside the ranking and the ranking starts being useful.

The most upvoted comment on the video was not an answer. It was a question — I have never understood why that one is always #1. Carrying that question to the shelf is what twenty minutes of this video was for.

Keep Reading

• How to Order from Olive Young Global from the US: shipping, duties, and what Koreans actually put in the cart
• 40 Korean Toner Pads, Sorted Into Five Jobs: the same shelf read by job instead of by rank