Long before “essence” appeared on a single skincare label, it existed as a practice, not a product. Beauty waters made from fermented rice, tea leaves and root extracts were part of ancient Chinese skincare rituals, prized for softening and brightening the skin, and the tradition travelled into Korea over a thousand years ago, during the Goryeo Dynasty, where ginseng, green tea and rice water became staples of court beauty routines. Ginseng essence water, in other words, is one of the oldest beauty ideas we have. What’s changed is that we can now measure why it worked.

That history is part of why I chose Beauty of Joseon’s Ginseng Essence Water for this month’s feature. But the bigger reason is more personal. Ginseng was my mother’s root, quite literally. She never called it skincare; she called it health. She’d keep a thermos of hot water on the go, ginseng root and ginger steeped in a mug and topped up through the morning, switching over to oolong in the afternoon. It wasn’t a ritual to her, just what you did for your body as you got older. It’s taken me until my own fifties to understand that she may have been onto something the research is only now catching up to.

What the science says about ginseng essence water

Ginseng’s reputation as a general tonic is old news. What’s newer is the specific evidence on skin. A 2025 study on ginseng peptide extracts found they reduced inflammatory markers and reactive oxygen species in skin cells while measurably boosting collagen synthesis in human fibroblasts, and held up in 3D skin models exposed to UV damage, restoring barrier proteins rather than just masking damage. A separate 2026 review of five years of ginseng research describes its bioactive compounds acting on inflammation, pigmentation, barrier function and skin regeneration all at once, which is a wide net for one root to cast.

For women specifically past 50, there’s a second, less-discussed body of research worth knowing about. Multiple randomized, placebo-controlled trials have found ginseng reduces hot flashes and improves quality of life during menopause, alongside measurable gains in sexual function and wellbeing. Crucially, one review noted this happens without shifting estrogen or prolactin levels, and without any observed increase in breast cancer risk, which matters given how often women are (rightly) cautious about anything that touches hormone pathways. On the skin side specifically, fermented ginseng extracts have been shown in vitro to encourage procollagen formation while inhibiting the enzymes that break collagen down, and to reduce pigment spots, both of which are exactly the two things most of us are trying to manage by our fifties: firmness and even tone. You can read about the serum I’m using to reduce dark spots here

Why it earns a place in the routine

None of this makes ginseng essence water a miracle in a bottle, and I’d be wary of anyone who tells you it is. But it does mean the appeal isn’t just nostalgia or marketing. There’s a plausible, increasingly well-documented mechanism behind why this ingredient has stayed in beauty routines for a thousand years, and why it may matter more, not less, as skin ages. The Beauty of Joseon formula is straightforward: ginseng essence tapped in after cleansing, before the rest of the routine, doing the quiet work of feeding the skin barrier rather than sitting on top of it.

I like that my mother’s thermos of ginseng and the pink box on my bathroom shelf are, in the end, the same idea, just applied differently. She was managing something from the inside. I’m borrowing the same root to help manage it from the outside. I suspect she’d have approved of both.