Ryan Park

Ryan Park founded Whamisa in 2010 as a collaboration between chemists, botanists, dermatologists and fermentation experts — a cross-disciplinary founding team that reflects the brand's thesis that clean skincare is simultaneously a scientific, agricultural and cultural project.

His scientific landmark was registering a Lactobacillus plantarum strain — isolated from kimchi, the traditional Korean fermented food — with the international germ bank: the first cosmetics-specific registration of a kimchi-derived probiotic strain globally. The brand name encodes its ingredient philosophy: 'WHA' (flower), 'MI' (beauty), 'SA' (the number four), referencing roots, seeds, flowers and fruits.

Whamisa came before 'clean beauty' was a global category. Park was formulating without synthetic preservatives, without distilled water as a base, and without animal testing before the international market had built a vocabulary for what that meant.

A 307-hour two-step natural fermentation process — the same principle of slow transformation that underlies kimchi, doenjang and ganjang — is what makes natural ingredients bioavailable to the skin.

Waterless by design since founding, using fermented filtrate bases rather than distilled water.

Preservation without preservatives — drawing from the traditional Korean practice of wrapping freshly cooked rice cakes in leaves to use plant nanoparticles for ingredient integrity.