Independent verification notes on cosmetic medicine in South Korea

Seoul · No sponsorship, no clinic names, no paid placements

Category: Culture & Etiquette

Customs, etiquette and the rules behind behaviour visitors notice in Korea.

  • Does Your K-pop Album Purchase Count on the Hanteo Chart? The Store Matters, Not Your Country

    Note № 53
    VERIFIED  2026-08-09PRIMARY SOURCES  —SPONSORSHIP  NONE

    International fans keep asking whether ordering an album from outside Korea keeps it off the Hanteo Chart. The country you order from is not what decides it. Two things are: whether the store reports to Hanteo, and whether the sale lands inside the counting window.

    The store has to be a Hanteo Family store

    Hanteo counts sales reported by affiliated retailers it calls Hanteo Family. Buy from a shop outside that network and the sale does not exist as far as the chart is concerned, no matter where you live or what you paid.

    You do not have to guess which shops those are. Hanteo publishes a searchable list, in English, and it is the only answer worth trusting:

    Stores we found listed there include Weverse Shop, KTOWN4U, YesAsia, MUSIC PLAZA, Aladin, YES24, LIGHTUPK and COKODIVE. We did not find Amazon or Sokollab. Kpop Town states on its own site that it is affiliated, but we could not confirm it on Hanteo’s list — check the list yourself before ordering if the chart matters to you.

    Hanteo’s own February 2025 notice puts the network at roughly 1,500 sales channels worldwide. A figure of 5,000-plus circulates online, but it traces back to community-edited wikis rather than to Hanteo, so treat it as unverified.

    Timing: the sale counts when the store reports it, not when you pay

    This is where most pre-orders get lost. KTOWN4U’s notice is explicit that its site shows every paid order the moment payment clears, while Hanteo only counts what has actually shipped. Kpoptown and LIGHTUPK both describe the same rule — counted at shipping, not at checkout.

    It is not perfectly uniform, though. At least one affiliated store, Music Plant, states it counts on payment completion instead. The safe way to think about it: the sale registers when your store transmits it, which is usually dispatch, and the exact moment is the store’s to define.

    First-week sales — chodong — run seven days from the release date, the release date included. An order that ships after that window still counts toward the overall chart. It just does not count toward the number fans are usually watching.

    What your country does and does not affect

    It does not decide whether the album counts. It does decide which chart it lands on: Hanteo sorts sales into national and global sub-charts by shipping destination. So a purchase from abroad counts — it just may not count where you expected to see it.

    Not relevant at all: your billing address, and the currency you paid in.

    The QR card in the album is a separate system

    Many albums ship with a QR-coded authentication card. It does not decide whether your purchase counts. Hanteo says so directly in its own help centre: an album bought from a Hanteo Family store is counted whether or not you manage to authenticate it. Authentication feeds a different set of rankings — the Global Authentication Chart and the Star Chart — not the sales chart.

    Hanteo Chart and Circle Chart are not the same thing

    A second source of confusion. Hanteo is privately run and updates in real time, built on point-of-sale data from its retail network. Circle Chart — renamed from Gaon in July 2022 — is run by the Korea Music Content Association with Ministry of Culture backing, and is built on shipment figures from distributors. It publishes weekly, monthly and annual charts.

    Different inputs, different networks. A strong first week on one does not guarantee the same on the other.

    What we could not confirm

    • Whether Amazon, Sokollab or Kpop Town are currently Hanteo Family stores
    • The exact daily cutoff time Hanteo uses to close a counting day
    • Whether the counting formula itself changed in 2025 or 2026 — the last structural change we could date is the Hanteo Chart 4.0 album index in July 2022

    Sources

    Verified 10 August 2026.

    Related guides

  • You Don’t Tip in Korea, and There’s a Rule Behind It

    Note № 42
    VERIFIED  2026-08-04PRIMARY SOURCES  3SPONSORSHIP  NONE

    The advice every guide gives is correct: do not tip in Korea. What none of them explain is why it stuck, in a world where tipping has spread almost everywhere else.

    There is a rule underneath it, and once you know the rule the whole question stops being about etiquette.

    The price on the menu is the price

    Under Korea’s price display rules, a restaurant’s displayed price must be the final amount the customer pays.

    VAT and service charge cannot be shown separately

    The Seoul city food-safety authority states it plainly: VAT and service charges cannot be listed separately and must be included in the food price as the actual final amount the customer has to pay. Verified 2026-08-05.

    Seoul brought this in for food businesses on 1 January 2013. It applies to ordinary restaurants, snack bars, bakeries and licensed drinking establishments.

    So there is no line at the bottom of a Korean restaurant bill where a tip could naturally go, because the format that produces such a line is not permitted. The number on the menu is the number on the card reader.

    It has teeth

    The penalties escalate: a corrective order for a first violation, a seven-day suspension of business for a second, fifteen days for a third, with fines available in place of suspension.

    That is a real enforcement regime for what looks like a formatting rule. It exists because opaque pricing was a genuine consumer problem, and the fix was to make the displayed price the whole price.

    Service charges are optional and mostly hotels

    봉사료, a service charge, is not mandated by any law. Where it appears it is typically around 10%, and it is the establishment’s own decision.

    In practice you will meet it at luxury hotels rather than restaurants — precisely because the display rule pushed it out of restaurant menus. Some major hotels apply it, others do not.

    Where tipping is creeping in anyway

    It would be wrong to say tipping does not exist in Korea in 2026. It exists in a few narrow places, and it is unpopular.

    The taxi app

    Kakao T, which dominates ride-hailing here, added a voluntary “thank-you tip” in July 2023. It appears only after you give a driver five stars, only on premium tiers rather than standard taxis, and offers ₩1,000, ₩1,500 or ₩2,000.

    You will probably never see it. Standard taxis are excluded.

    The pattern in both cases

    Notice what these two have in common. Both arrived through an app interface rather than through anyone’s behaviour changing, and both attach to a screen you were already looking at.

    Tipping spreads that way now — not as a custom people adopt, but as a default someone adds to a checkout flow. Korea’s price-display rule blocks that route for restaurants, which is most of why the practice has not travelled further here.

    The delivery “tip” that is not one

    Delivery apps charge a 배달팁, literally “delivery tip.” It is a distance-and-demand-based delivery fee, not a gratuity, and consumer groups have complained precisely because calling a mandatory fee a tip is misleading.

    If a delivery app shows you a “tip,” it is a shipping charge. You are not deciding anything.

    How Koreans feel about it

    A 2023 survey of 12,106 people found 73% said they could not accept tipping culture at all. Nineteen percent were neutral, treating it as acceptable only if genuinely voluntary. Five percent were positive.

    A tip jar that appeared in a Seoul bakery around the same time drew enough public criticism that it was removed. That is the temperature.

    What to actually do

    At restaurants, cafes and bars

    Pay the price shown. Nothing else.

    Leaving cash on the table is more likely to produce a staff member chasing you down the street with it than gratitude. This is not a test of generosity — the money is genuinely not wanted, and the transaction is over.

    In taxis

    No tip, and no rounding up. Pay the meter.

    If you are using a premium ride tier through an app and want to add the in-app tip, that is a supported option. Cash pressed on a driver is not.

    For tour guides and drivers

    Here is the one real exception, and it is a foreign-facing one.

    Private guides and drivers working with international tour operators do often expect gratuities, because the operators tell their customers to expect it. When a tour’s fine print says “gratuities not included,” that is the operator’s own convention, not Korean practice — it means the tip is not in the package price and you are expected to budget separately.

    Ask the operator what they actually recommend rather than applying a home-country percentage.

    Quick summary

    • Do not tip in Korean restaurants, cafes, bars, taxis or hotels. It is not expected and can be awkward.
    • Korean price-display rules require the menu price to be the final payable amount, with VAT and service charge included, not listed separately. Verified 2026-08-05.
    • Seoul applied this to food businesses from 1 January 2013, with escalating penalties from a corrective order to a 15-day suspension.
    • 봉사료 service charges are discretionary, not legally required, typically around 10% and mostly at luxury hotels.
    • Kakao T added a voluntary tip in July 2023 — premium tiers only, ₩1,000–₩2,000, after a five-star rating.
    • A delivery app’s 배달팁 is a delivery fee, not a gratuity.
    • A 2023 survey of 12,106 people found 73% could not accept tipping culture.
    • The exception is private tour guides and drivers working with international operators, where “gratuities not included” means budget separately.

    Before you go

    The interesting part is the mechanism. Tipping does not thrive where the posted price is legally required to be the final price, because the gap tipping lives in has been closed by regulation rather than by custom.

    That is worth carrying beyond restaurants. When a Korean business shows you a number, it is far more often the whole number than you would expect coming from somewhere with sales tax added at the till.

    Verified 2026-08-05. If a restaurant has added a service charge on top of a displayed price, that is worth reporting — to me through the contact page, and arguably to the district office.

    Sources and last verification

    Prices, fares and hours in Korea change often. Everything above was checked against these sources on the dates shown. If you spot something out of date, please tell me via the contact page.

    About the author — H.I. Kang

    I was born in Korea and still live here. Travelling abroad, I have been the person stuck at a ticket machine in a language I could not read, holding up the queue and guessing — and I know how small a thing it takes to ruin an afternoon. This site exists so that visitors to Korea do not have to guess. Every price, route and rule here is checked against an official source before it is published, and dated so you can see how current it is.

    Related guides