What Korea actually certifies

Korea did not invent personal colour, but it is where the practice became an industry. The honest way to size it is not a market estimate — those are written by people selling into the market — but a government register. Under the Framework Act on Qualifications, anyone in Korea who creates a private credential has to file it with the Private Qualification Information Service, run by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training for the Ministry of Education. On 27 August 2026 that register returned 241 live credentials with 퍼스널컬러 — personal colour — in the name.

Registration is a filing, not an assessment. Nobody inspects the syllabus; the operator declares it. The register keeps a second and far narrower category, 국가공인, for credentials that have been through review and been accredited, and the two numbers are worth setting beside each other: 66,228 private qualifications sit on that register across every field in Korea, and 98 of them hold accreditation. None of the 241 is among the 98.

The register timestamps each filing too, which gives an unusually clean picture of when this happened. The oldest personal-colour credential still on it was filed in 2012. Thirty-nine of the 241 predate 2020. A hundred and twenty-one — half of them — were filed in 2024 or later, and 2026 is not over. Withdrawn credentials move to a separate list, so those figures are a floor rather than a census.

There is a state qualification for colour in Korea, and what it examines is instructive. 컬러리스트기사, the colourist engineer certificate, was created by Presidential Decree No. 17591 on 27 April 2002 and is examined by the Human Resources Development Service of Korea. Its written papers are colour design planning, colour design strategy, colour mixing and colour management, and colour design production; the practical is a colour-planning exercise of about six hours. The work it describes is product planning, consumer research, colour standards, colour design, colour management. In 2025, 1,879 people sat the written paper and 871 passed. Not one line of it is about reading a face.

Korean researchers have been arguing about that gap in public for years. A 2021 paper by Jeong Yoon-seok opens by saying that the representative personal-colour systems either oversimplify the diagnostic types or make it hard to tell them apart objectively, and proposes a twenty-type coding matrix built precisely so that the examiner's own competence and subjectivity intervene as little as possible. He builds it on PCCS, the hue-and-tone system the Japan Color Research Institute published in 1964 — not on the four palettes that came out of the American books.

The sharpest result in that literature is older. In 2011 Cha Ho-yeon and Kim Jeong-hee took 200 Korean women in their twenties, diagnosed each of them four times — with British drapes, with Japanese, with Korean and with German — and measured their skin with a spectrophotometer. The systems did not sort people on the same axis. The Korean system separated its seasons most cleanly on lightness and on yellowness; the German system on redness. And the Korean system placed its winter type at the highest yellowness of its four seasons, which the authors note does not follow the theory the system is built on.

The study everyone would want has not been done. Send one person to five analysts and count how often the answers agree: searches of the Korean and the international indexes turn up no such paper. Until one exists, agreement between analysts is not a number anybody has — in Korea or anywhere else.

None of which makes a consultation worthless. Two hundred and forty-one credentials and an accelerating filing rate describe a service people want and come back for, and a careful opinion about which colours suit you is a real thing to buy. What is worth knowing is what the paperwork behind it certifies: that a credential exists, not that it works. Percol produces an opinion too, and it is better for saying so.