Our Story
Our Story
From farm to face, from Korea to the world.
FG Beauty began with a plant that refuses to give up — and a founder who grew up watching it work.
The plant
A cactus that survives −30°C.
Korean cactus — Opuntia ficus-indica, known at home as cheon-nyeon-cho — is not the cactus you're picturing. It grows wild on the Korean peninsula through winters that fall to −30°C and summers that climb near 50°C, a range that would kill most desert species.
It survives by storing water in a thick natural mucilage, and by producing the antioxidants it needs to handle that much sun and cold. Korean traditional medicine has used it for centuries. What interested us was simpler: a plant that has solved the problem of holding onto moisture in hostile conditions is a plant worth putting on skin.
A note on the name. You'll see it called prickly pear, nopal, or Korean cactus depending on where you are. The variety we grow is native to Korea and biochemically distinct from the desert cacti of North America and Mexico — different climate, different plant, different composition.
The farm
We grow it ourselves. That's the whole point.
Most skincare brands buy extract from a supplier who bought it from a broker. We own the farm — on the coast of the Goheung peninsula, where clean sea air and four distinct seasons produce a harder, more concentrated plant.
We monitor the soil, we time the harvest, we pick by hand. It's slower and more expensive than buying commodity extract, and it's the only way to know exactly what goes into the bottle.
The technology
CN-27, and why it matters.
Growing a good plant is half the job. The other half is getting it into skin. Our patented low-temperature extraction method, CN-27, produces an extract with dramatically lower surface tension than common humectants — which in practice means it spreads thin and absorbs, instead of beading up and sitting on the surface.
Surface tension
mN/m
Glycerin65
Hyaluronic acid52–56
Cactus, hot-water extract46
CN-27 cactus extract25
Contact angle: 8° for CN-27 versus 62° for hyaluronic acid, measured the same way. Lower is better. Source: FG Beauty CN-27 patent research.
The founder
It started as a household remedy.
Our founder, Dr. Andy Yoo, grew up in a house where cactus was what you reached for when a child came home sunburnt. Decades later, that memory became doctoral research in Beauty & Cosmetology — and then a farm, an extraction patent, and a company.
FG Beauty is built on that sequence: a traditional remedy, examined properly, then rebuilt with modern formulation. Not folklore, and not a lab with no connection to the ground — both halves, in the right order.
What we promise
Three things, every time.
01 — NATURE
Grown, not sourced
Our core ingredient comes from our own farm. We can tell you what season it was picked in.
02 — SCIENCE
Patented, and measured
CN-27 isn't a marketing word. It's an extraction patent with numbers behind it, published above.
03 — CLEAN
Vegan, and tested
Every formula is vegan, made with EWG green-grade ingredients, and tested for heavy metals and skin irritation.
Where we are
Known at home. New here.
In Korea you'll find us in LOTTE Department Store and Incheon Airport Duty-Free. We export to France, Italy, China and Hungary, and our formulas are registered with the FDA under MoCRA, notified in the EU under CPNP, and certified in the UK, Japan, China and Indonesia.
The United States is the newest chapter. If you've just found us, you're early — and we'd rather earn your trust with the product than with a louder launch.
FDA MoCRA registered
EU CPNP notified
Vegan certified
EWG green-grade
Cruelty-free
Start where most people start.
The Cactus Balancing Toner is the first step of the routine and the easiest way to see what the plant does. If you'd rather try the whole thing, the three-step Ritual Set saves $15.
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