Korean ingredients, tested and trusted for our skin and hair | Hallyu + Bephor
Where else can you order a new beauty product online, get a call from the creator of the product and end up having a fat chat about her entrepreneurial journey, plus get your order an hour later?
Only in South Africa.
Nolu Mkhonza is co-owner and director of Hallyu Korean Skincare, an online platform for authentic Korean beauty products, and co-creator of Bephor, a K-Beauty haircare brand for natural hair.
We’ll get to Bephor in a minute ... what I love about Hallyu is the considered product selection. I recognise a handful of the brands and even use one or two, but the rest are new to me, and I want to know more. Nolu tells me that Hallyu grew out of her own skin challenges – the secret to which she unlocked while living in Korea.
For years, she would need to fly home to South Africa to refill her skin medication to treat acne that has been troubling her since she was 16 and return with a a cooler bag antibiotics and special creams mixed by a well-known dermatologist. She was still on the same regimen at 30, still flying home, still packing the cooler bag. Then one trip, the timing didn't work. So she walked into a Korean skincare store she’d never paid any mind to and asked for help in broken Korean. A shop assistant talked her through a routine built around a single idea: that most skin problems come down to a damaged barrier, not a list of symptoms to individually suppress. Within days, she could feel it working. That brand was The Face Shop.
Years later when she travelled to Seoul, Haramoon saw her through the snowy winter and then the dry heat in Johannesburg. She now treats it as a reset for anything else that irritates her skin. ‘If something hurts me, Haramoon takes it right back to its perfect state. It has become a personal favourite for restoring my skin barrier.’
And so, it reframed everything she thought she understood about skincare. Gone was the need for Roaccutane, which she’d been on since she was a teen.
‘I’m forty-one now. For years, I relied on medication to manage symptoms, but Korean skincare introduced me to a preventative, barrier-focused approach that worked far better for me personally.’
Hallyu grew out of that reframing. She’d found products that worked on her own skin and wanted to bring them home, but was wary of simply importing whatever brands she was being sent. She wanted to test the product first and see if the it worked on our melanated skin. So every product stocked on Hallyu has been tried and tested. Beyond that, Nolu is also interested in the brand's story – why it was formulated, what problem it was built to solve. Passing the testing stage doesn't guarantee a permanent spot on the platform, either. She’s dropped brands that turned out to be inconsistent to work with, or overly restrictive about how their products could be marketed, and she treats customer feedback as an ongoing filter rather than a one-off checkpoint.
Nolu had been trading informally for close to two years, building a customer base, before officially launching Hallyu in 2024. She met June Lim, who specialises in African hair and scalp health while living and teaching in Korea. He’d spent close to a decade working in Black haircare, and their conversations about textured hair and scalp health stuck with her long after that first meeting. The friendship became a business partnership built on one shared conviction: that African consumers deserved products designed specifically for their hair and scalp, not adapted from something built for someone else’s.
Working together on building and refining Bephor, which June founded, brings their skills and expertise in the best possible way. June is a certified dermatologist and trichologist and Nolu listens, gathers insights, tracks consumer behaviour, working out what African consumers actually need. ‘I teach June about our culture, our hair practice, our concerns and our priorities. He brings Korean research, innovation and technical knowledge. His depth of knowledge is extraordinary, but what impresses me most is his ability to listen and translate real consumer experiences into thoughtful, effective formulations. Together we co-create solutions that neither of us could have built alone.’
Bephor is formulated for our hair. If barrier repair mattered this much for skin, scalp health should matter just as much for afro and textured hair, especially under protective styles that seal moisture and irritation in for weeks at a time. And let me tell you, all the products smell like they are made with a soft, loving touch.
The range centres on a Scalp Cleansing Toner formulated with apple cider vinegar, centella and licorice root. ‘If you have cornrows in, it works along the parting lines. Apple cider vinegar cleanses and balances scalp pH, reducing itchiness and odour. The centella calms the scalp – because you're always scratching – hydrates and actually repairs tissue damage,’ Nolu explains. ‘The licorice root, which is a staple in Korean haircare, strengthens the root and targets the active inflammatory signals that cause itching, burning and redness.’
The Scalp Sleeping Oil Balm follows, for any remaining irritation on the scalp itself. One of its most distinctive features is its texture: it melts into a lightweight oil on contact with the warmth of the skin, delivering relief without leaving heavy residue or product build-up on the scalp. The Oil-Blend Reviving Hair Mist is used further down, on the hair rather than the scalp, to reduce cuticle damage.
It’s a small, specific routine – borrowing Korean ingredients and applying a philosophy Nolu and June have designed a system that focuses on a part of the haircare conversation that usually gets left out.
‘As Bephor prepares to expand into new markets, including France, the partnership remains guided by the same question that started it all: what do people need and how can we create something genuinely better for them?’
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