What to Know About K-Beauty Expiry Dates & When to Toss That Product

New year, fresh start! One thing you should be doing at the start of every year is checking the expiry dates of your beauty products. Due to the active ingredients used in K-beauty formulas, it’s crucial to use a product when its ingredients are still fresh and effective for the intended results. Holding onto expired products can do more harm than good, and it’s better to toss a serum you’ve only used halfway through as opposed to shelling out the cash for expensive remedies–or potentially even a visit to the dermatologist–after irritating your skin with an expired product.

To help you through organizing and decluttering your routine for a fresh start, we’ve created this guide to demystify product expiry and break down how to tell when your products need to be tossed out. Make sure to bookmark it for everything there is to know about K-beauty expiry deets so you have it at your fingertips whenever you need a refresher. Without further ado, keep scrolling to learn more.

Why should I throw out expired products?

Before we get into the finer details, we wanted to address a question that we get asked a lot: Do I have to throw away expired products? In some cases, an expiry date can be regarded as a suggestion, such as in the case of bread that has gone past its date but still looks, smells and tastes as normal without any signs of mold.

We take beauty products a little more seriously because the signs aren’t always as clear. You might not always be able to tell if the active ingredients within your products are no longer effective, safe to use or have bacterial growth within them, which is enough reason to take expiration dates and periods more seriously. Best case? Your product is no longer effective but there are no signs of harm. Worst case? Irritation, infection or a skin concern that takes a long time to eradicate. Do the smart thing of preventing potential problems by decluttering what no longer serves you.

Expiry Dates

Something to love about K-beauty products is you’ll rarely find one without an expiry date stamped onto it. These dates are provided by manufacturers to let you, the user, know when your products are no longer efficacious. This could mean the active ingredients no longer provide the results they’re intended to give, or the texture of the formula has changed from its original. Check these periodically (including the start of the year) to make sure what you’re applying is still safe for the skin, and declutter with confidence anything that is past its date.

Expiry Periods

Some products don’t have specific dates attached to them, but will feature graphics indicating expiry periods. They’ll consist of an outline of a jar with a time period within it, meaning from whenever you open your product, you have the stated amount of time after opening the product to use it before it’s considered expired. It’s sometimes difficult to remember how long you’ve been using a product for, so a handy tip is to label on the product the specific date you opened it on, and you can refer back to the date to calculate how much time you have left.

General Tips

Let’s say you have a product that has no expiry labelling at all. This is when you can apply some general rules regarding product expiry, of which certain products have a broad expiry period after opening before they should be thrown away. With products like cleansers, toners, serums, essences, ampoules, creams and sunscreens, you have approximately 12 months to use them up before you should toss them. Again, it would be helpful to label the day you opened your products so you can refer back to it when organising your stash.

For any products that have changed scent, color or texture, remove these from your collection immediately. Sometimes there are natural changes to a product which a brand will notify their consumers about on their packaging or marketing, and this product is still safe to use within a given period. However, formulas can be affected by external factors like sun exposure or temperature that cause them to go bad before its expiry date.

A common example is the oxidation of Vitamin C: light exposure to Vitamin C can cause it to oxidize before its expiry date, and this oxidation renders the ingredient ineffective and potentially irritating to the skin. If you notice a difference to your products that you don’t recognize, better to be safe than sorry.

Shelf Life

What if you’ve got a cream in your stash that you haven’t got round to using, and are saving for when your current moisturizer runs out? Beauty products have a general shelf life of 24-36 months, which means they are still usable granted they have not been opened and unsealed. Once you open a product, refer back to the rule of expiry periods to ensure freshness, potency and usefulness.

Something to Bear in Mind

Beauty products are intended to be consumables, and therefore have a finite lifespan. Avoid opening up more products than you can use to get the best value out of each of them, and you’ll be setting yourself up to fully enjoy the intended effects of your collection.

Now that you’ve decluttered your routine of expired products, get yourself stocked up with our current favorites.

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