Choose a seller you can verify
The clearest way to check a seller is to look for it on the brand's own store or authorised-retailer list. Brand shops, department stores and licensed duty-free shops provide established routes for buying luxury goods. For cosmetics, Olive Young is a major Korean health and beauty retailer, but you should still check the product, price and return conditions before paying.
Keep the receipt, product packaging and seller's contact details. A receipt helps with a complaint, although it does not by itself prove authenticity. A familiar business name is also insufficient if an online seller is impersonating that business; check the actual website or account.
A very low price for a luxury brand, an unidentified seller or a refusal to provide a receipt are reasons to pause. A market stall is not automatically selling counterfeits, and an expensive shop is not automatically selling genuine goods.
Counterfeits include more than bags
Korea's 2025 trademark-enforcement report records 142,995 seized products. These included jewellery, cosmetics, clothing, bags, shoes and watches. The report also describes sales through social-media accounts and live streams.
Those figures describe products found in enforcement cases. They do not tell you what proportion of goods in a particular market or shop are counterfeit.
Some counterfeit products also present a health risk
Korea Customs' report on the first half of 2025 says that 112 of 250 tested products exceeded safety limits for substances such as lead, cadmium or plasticisers. This was a selected group of products, not a random sample of everything sold in Korea.
You cannot detect these substances by looking at a piece of jewellery or smelling a cosmetic. If you cannot verify a product's source, do not rely on attractive packaging as evidence of safety.
Check the rules at your destination
Korea's Trademark Act addresses activities such as making, selling and possessing counterfeit goods for transfer. Personal ownership and commercial distribution are different issues; that distinction does not establish that taking a counterfeit product across a border is permitted.
Your destination's rules apply when you return home. The United States regulation contains a limited personal-luggage exception with conditions on the number and type of articles, timing and later sale. It does not provide the same exception for parcels.
The EU customs-enforcement regulation excludes non-commercial goods in travellers' personal luggage from its scope. That exclusion is not a guarantee that every member country's rules permit a particular purchase. Check the customs authority for the country you will enter.
Korea Post lists counterfeit and pirated goods among the goods prohibited in international mail.
Report a suspected counterfeit
Keep photographs, receipts, messages and the seller's details. Korea's intellectual-property infringement centre accepts reports about suspected infringement. If a seller represented a counterfeit as genuine, the consumer complaint routes in “I was overcharged or scammed” may also help you seek a refund.
