Seoul
Chief MD, Gangnam
Duk-ha Kim
The trust our patients have placed in this clinic was built on conviction and principle. We intend to hold to both, unchanged, through the next hundred years.
Medical skincare menu guide
Acne Care
Acne care is a heading on a clinic menu. It is usually filed under medical skincare and collects the in-clinic routine items done in a treatment room during a scheduled appointment — hydro-peel style cleansing, lesion extraction, a soothing step, sometimes a light chemical peel. Acne treatment is filed separately because acne is a condition with published guidelines, and the 2024 American Academy of Dermatology guideline puts its strong recommendations on medication. Reading the two headings side by side is the useful exercise: they differ in what has been examined, not only in how gentle they sound.
- What the heading collects
- In-clinic routine items: hydro-peel style cleansing, lesion extraction, a soothing step, sometimes a light peel
- Where the guideline commits
- Strong recommendations: benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics, oral doxycycline
- Where care-type procedures sit
- Peels, laser and light devices, microneedling, lesion extraction — evidence insufficient to develop a recommendation
- Class of hydro-peel style devices
- Product code GFE, 21 CFR 878.4820, Class I and exempt from 510(k)
What is a clinic telling you when it files acne under care rather than treatment?
It is telling you where the item was filed for booking, and very little else. A care heading normally sits under medical skincare, next to hydrating and calming programmes, and gathers the things that happen in a treatment room during a scheduled appointment: a hydro-peel style cleansing device, lesion extraction, a soothing or cooling step, sometimes a light chemical peel. A treatment heading sits in a condition-based group instead, where acne is handled as a diagnosis. The words care and treatment are menu vocabulary chosen by the clinic, so neither word carries a claim on its own. What does carry information is the inventory underneath each heading, and how much has been published about each item in that inventory.
Sources: AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)
Once you look at regulation and evidence, what actually separates the two headings?
Different things have been examined about each, by different bodies, to different depths. The medications that fill a treatment plan are regulated as medicines, prescribed under national rules, and graded inside a clinical guideline — the 2024 AAD guideline issues strong recommendations for benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics and oral doxycycline. The items that fill a care menu are procedures and devices. Hydro-peel style equipment falls into a device class exempt from premarket submission, so its effectiveness and its indications were never assessed by the agency at all, and the procedures themselves sit in the guideline group the panel could not place in either direction. That is the real gap between the headings: one side has been judged and graded, the other has largely not been examined in a form that produces a judgement.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)FDA product classification GFE — powered dermabrasion brush
Where does the 2024 guideline put the procedures a care menu is built from?
In a third category that is neither for nor against. In its own wording, available evidence was insufficient to develop recommendations for procedures such as chemical peels, laser and light-based devices, and microneedling. Insufficient to develop a recommendation means the trials were too few, too small or too inconsistent for the panel to take a position — it is a statement about the state of the literature, not a verdict on the procedure. The guideline makes exactly one narrow call in the negative, and it concerns a combination rather than a category: a conditional recommendation against adding broadband light (IPL) to adapalene 0.3% gel. Widen the frame and the uncertainty widens with it. A 2024 Cochrane overview pooling six systematic reviews, 275 trials and 40,910 participants concluded that no high-certainty evidence was found for the effects of any therapy included, rating even benzoyl peroxide very low certainty. So the honest summary is not that care is weak and medication is proven; it is that formal guidance exists on one side and not on the other, while certainty is limited across the whole field.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)Cochrane overview — topical, light-based and complementary interventions for acne (2024)
Extraction is the part of the appointment you can see happening — how should you read that?
Carefully, because visible immediate change and published evidence are two different things. In the Academy’s summary of the 2024 update, acne lesion extraction appears in the same group as chemical peels, laser and light-based devices and microneedling: procedures for which available evidence was insufficient to develop a recommendation. Nothing in that sentence declares extraction harmful and nothing prohibits it. What it does say is that the studies needed to place extraction inside a treatment sequence have not been done to a standard the panel could use, so the position it should occupy in a plan is genuinely unsettled. The practical consequence is about weighting rather than avoidance. An appointment can contain extraction; a plan built so that repeated extraction sessions are the plan has no guideline support standing behind that structure, because the components that do carry strong recommendations are on the medication side.
Sources: AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)
What regulatory class do hydro-peel style care devices belong to?
In the United States they fall under product code GFE, the powered dermabrasion brush classification at 21 CFR 878.4820, which is Class I and exempt from 510(k). Exempt means a manufacturer in that class does not file a premarket submission at all, so the agency has never reviewed the effectiveness of those devices or the indications claimed for them. Three misreadings are worth naming. Exempt does not mean the class was found unsafe. Exempt does not mean it was found safe either, since a finding requires a review and no review took place. And exempt is certainly not an approval for acne. One more limit applies: a US classification describes US market entry only, so it says nothing about how the same equipment is registered in Korea or where you live. The usable question at a consultation is which device is used by model name, and under which national registration in the country where you are being treated.
Sources: FDA product classification GFE — powered dermabrasion brush
If a light peel is added to the session, how solid is the evidence behind that addition?
Thinner than the frequency of the item suggests. A systematic review in BMJ Open identified 12 randomised controlled trials of chemical peels for acne, covering 387 participants, and judged their methodological quality very low to moderate. The reviewers could not perform a meta-analysis because of clinical heterogeneity across the trials, which means no single pooled effect estimate for peels in acne exists from that body of work — a reader is left with a set of small, differently designed studies rather than one combined number. The participants were also predominantly Fitzpatrick skin types I to IV, so extension of those findings to darker skin is limited by who was enrolled. Set that against the guideline, where chemical peels sit in the insufficient-evidence group, and the picture is consistent: peels for acne are studied, but not yet to a depth that supports firm positioning.
Sources: Chen X et al., BMJ Open 2018;8:e019607 — chemical peels for acne, systematic review of RCTsAAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)
What about the dark marks left behind after a breakout settles?
Those are post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, and they are frequently the reason someone books a care appointment in the first place. PIH is a pigment change in skin that has healed, distinct from an active lesion; textural scarring is a separate problem again and is not covered on this page. A 2024 PRISMA systematic review in the Journal of Cutaneous Medicine and Surgery examined treatment of PIH in skin of colour across 48 studies and 1,356 participants, with Fitzpatrick III at 20%, IV at 40%, V at 34% and VI at 6% of those participants. Its authors concluded that robust evidence was lacking across all treatment groups, and specifically noted that chemical peels were associated with increased adverse events compared with alternative options. Read those two findings together and the implication for a care menu is uncomfortable but useful: the concern most likely to bring someone through the door is the one with the least settled evidence, and the item most often added to a care session is the one the review flags for adverse events in exactly this population.
Sources: Mar K et al., J Cutan Med Surg 2024 — treatment of PIH in skin of colour, systematic reviewChen X et al., BMJ Open 2018;8:e019607 — chemical peels for acne, systematic review of RCTs
Can a care programme on its own bring acne under control?
The published guidance does not support planning it that way. Every strong recommendation in the 2024 guideline is a medication — benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics, oral doxycycline — used daily or taken by mouth across weeks to months, which is work done at home rather than in a treatment room. A care appointment happens at intervals, lasts an appointment, and consists of items the panel could not recommend either way. That does not make care pointless; it makes it an adjunct whose position in the sequence has not been established. So the sequence question is the one to ask out loud. If a proposed plan contains no diagnosis step and no medication at all, ask what the plan is based on, and ask what would have to change for medication to enter it. If a plan contains both, ask which part is expected to do which job.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)
How long does the effect of an acne care session actually last?
None of the sources cited on this page reports how long the visible result of a care session lasts, because none of the studies behind them was designed to measure that: the 2024 AAD guideline states plainly that evidence was insufficient to develop a recommendation for the procedures a care menu is built from, and a body of literature that cannot support a recommendation on effectiveness has not produced a duration figure either. What the same guideline does commit to is medication, and its four strong recommendations work differently for a structural reason — benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics and oral doxycycline are taken or applied daily over weeks to months, so ongoing use is the mechanism rather than a single session whose effect decays afterward. On the procedural side, what separates one person’s experience from another’s is not covered by a single figure in any source here: the BMJ Open review of chemical peels for acne found its 12 included trials too heterogeneous to pool into one result, precisely because peel strength, session count and how a trial defined improvement were not standardised — the same variables that separate one clinic’s programme from another’s — and extraction sits in the same insufficient-evidence group, so its reviewers had nothing to report about how long a cleared lesion stays clear. A care session addresses what is visible on the day, while the acne process underneath keeps running on its own schedule regardless of what the appointment removed. The consultation question worth asking directly is what the clinic bases a repeat-session interval on, since no guideline or trial schedule exists to check that answer against — ask whether the reason to return is a fixed calendar gap, a fresh assessment of active lesions, or something else, and ask separately whether medication is part of the plan, because that is the one component with a documented reason to expect its effect to continue only as long as it is used.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)Chen X et al., BMJ Open 2018;8:e019607 — chemical peels for acne, systematic review of RCTs
What is worth settling before you book a care appointment?
Settle the diagnosis, the sequence and the contents, in that order. Ask whether your acne has been assessed as a condition and whether medication forms part of the plan, because that is where the guideline places its strong recommendations. Ask what each care session contains item by item, which device is used and under which national registration, and whether extraction is billed as its own line. If marks rather than active lesions are your main concern, say so explicitly and ask how PIH is being approached and whether your skin tone changed anything in the proposal — the systematic review in skin of colour found robust evidence lacking across treatment groups and flagged increased adverse events with chemical peels, so a plan that ignores tone is ignoring the part of the literature that applies to you. Ask what continues at home between appointments, and ask what finding would make the clinic stop or change the plan.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)Mar K et al., J Cutan Med Surg 2024 — treatment of PIH in skin of colour, systematic reviewFDA product classification GFE — powered dermabrasion brush
Care menu, medication plan, device procedure or salon facial — what is each one offering?
This table separates four things that get discussed as if they were degrees of the same product. They are not: they differ in who provides them, what has been examined about them, and under what rules they are sold. The rows draw on different documents with different methods, so no row can be read as ranking above another.
| Option | What the appointment consists of | Where guidelines and reviews place it | Regulatory footing and what to confirm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acne care menu item | In-clinic routine work during a scheduled appointment: hydro-peel style cleansing, lesion extraction, a soothing step, sometimes a light peel | Its components sit in the group where the 2024 AAD guideline judged evidence insufficient to develop a recommendation, extraction included per the Academy’s summary of the update | No single regulatory category covers a programme; confirm the device model, its national registration, and each item the session contains |
| Guideline-recommended medication | Topical agents applied daily and oral medication taken over weeks to months, mostly at home rather than in a clinic room | Strong recommendations for benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics and oral doxycycline; even so, the 2024 Cochrane overview of 275 trials and 40,910 participants found no high-certainty evidence for any included therapy | Prescribed and supervised under national medicines rules; confirm how the prescription continues once you are no longer in the country |
| Device procedure booked separately | A session delivered by a registered device, usually on its own appointment line rather than inside a care package | Laser and light-based devices and microneedling sit in the same insufficient-evidence group; one narrow negative call exists — a conditional recommendation against adding broadband light (IPL) to adapalene 0.3% gel | Registration is device-specific and country-specific; confirm the exact model and what it is registered for where you are treated, not where it was first cleared |
| Beauty salon facial | Cleansing and cosmetic steps performed outside a medical setting, sometimes using equipment that looks similar to clinic equipment | Not addressed by an acne guideline at all, so no position exists for it inside the guideline framework | Who may operate which equipment, and whether a diagnosis may be made, are set by national rules; confirm the setting, the operator and whether any clinical assessment is part of it |
Insufficient evidence to develop a recommendation describes uncertainty in the literature, not a demonstrated failure of a procedure. Exemption from 510(k) means a device class was never reviewed, which is neither a safety finding nor a warning. None of these rows substitutes for being examined in person.
Sources: AAD acne management guidelines 2024 (JAAD 2024;90(5):1006.e1-30)AAD — updated guidelines for acne management (2024)Cochrane overview — topical, light-based and complementary interventions for acne (2024)Chen X et al., BMJ Open 2018;8:e019607 — chemical peels for acne, systematic review of RCTsMar K et al., J Cutan Med Surg 2024 — treatment of PIH in skin of colour, systematic reviewFDA product classification GFE — powered dermabrasion brush
Medical care at Abijou
Care is provided by the medical team at the branch you select. These clinicians lead the three branches linked from this guide; confirm the doctor assigned to your visit with that branch.
Chief MD, Myeongdong
Cheol-su Yoon
I want to be thinking about how the patient feels right up to the last moment of the procedure.
Chief MD, Hongdae
Jae-wook Kim
I will give my best with the attentiveness to catch even the smallest change.
Listed branch medical team — not a medical-review byline for this article.
Frequently asked questions
What does medical skincare mean as a heading on a Korean clinic menu?
It is a booking category that groups recurring in-clinic routine items, rather than a defined clinical term. Programmes for hydration, calming and acne are commonly filed together under it because they share a format: a scheduled appointment in a treatment room, a sequence of steps, and a plan that repeats at intervals. Because the heading describes format rather than content, two clinics can file quite different inventories under the same word. Treat it as a shelf label and ask for the inventory.
Which items are usually counted as care, and which are not?
Care usually covers the routine steps performed during the appointment itself — hydro-peel style cleansing, lesion extraction, a soothing or cooling step, and in many menus a light chemical peel. What is usually filed elsewhere are the parts that need either a prescription or a registered device on its own appointment line: topical and oral medication belong to the treatment side, and laser or light sessions are generally booked separately. The dividing line is administrative rather than clinical, which is exactly why the contents list matters more than the heading.
How is a hydro-peel style device meant to work, and what has actually been established about it?
What is established is its regulatory classification, not a demonstrated mechanism. Devices of this kind fall under US product code GFE, the powered dermabrasion brush class at 21 CFR 878.4820, which is Class I and exempt from 510(k) — meaning no premarket submission is filed and the agency has reviewed neither effectiveness nor indications for the class. So the public record describes what category the equipment sits in and nothing about what it achieves on acne. Any account of how a specific machine works should be traced to what the clinic can show you about that machine, and the wider guideline position on this family of procedures remains that evidence was insufficient to develop a recommendation.
Care or medication — which one has a guideline actually committed to?
Medication, and it is not close in terms of where formal guidance exists. All four strong recommendations in the 2024 AAD guideline are drugs: benzoyl peroxide, topical retinoids, topical antibiotics and oral doxycycline. The procedures that make up a care menu sit in the group where the panel found evidence insufficient to develop any recommendation. That contrast is about the availability of formal guidance rather than a proof-versus-disproof split, and the 2024 Cochrane overview across 275 trials and 40,910 participants is the reason for the caution: it found no high-certainty evidence for any therapy it included, benzoyl peroxide among them. Medication is where guidance commits; certainty is limited everywhere.
How is a care appointment different from booking a device procedure?
The difference is what is being sold and under what registration. A care appointment sells a sequence of routine steps as a package, often without any single component being a registered indication; a device procedure sells time on a specific machine that carries a registration naming what it may be used for. That gives you a different question in each case. For the package, ask for an itemised list and who performs each item. For the device, ask for the model name and what it is registered for in the country where you are treated. In guideline terms neither is distinguished — laser and light devices, microneedling, peels and extraction all sit in the same insufficient-evidence group — so the distinction is practical and regulatory, not a ranking.
Is clinic-based care different from a similar-sounding facial at a beauty salon?
The setting differs in who may assess you and what may legally be done, and that is the part to establish before comparing anything else. Equipment that looks similar can appear in both settings, particularly items in a class that requires no premarket review, so appearance is a poor guide. What a clinic can do that a salon cannot is make a diagnosis and prescribe the medication that carries the strong guideline recommendations. Rules on who may operate which equipment are national, so ask directly about the setting, the operator and whether any clinical assessment is included — and be aware that an acne guideline does not address salon services at all, so no evidence position exists to cite for them.
Does extraction hurt, and is redness afterwards expected?
No pain score and no recovery interval appears in any source cited here, so there is no honest number to give you. What can be said is that extraction has not been characterised in trials to the standard the 2024 guideline panel could use — it sits in the group where evidence was judged insufficient to develop a recommendation — which means published descriptions of its typical after-effects are correspondingly thin. Ask the clinic performing it what they expect for your skin specifically, what proportion of their patients report what, and how long any visible change usually lasts. An assurance that a procedure leaves no visible trace is a claim without published support behind it.
What should make me contact the clinic after a care appointment?
This is general post-procedure safety guidance rather than a finding of the studies cited elsewhere on this page. Contact the clinic promptly for blistering, a suspected burn, pain that increases instead of settling, drainage or pus, spreading redness or warmth, fever, a crust that does not heal, or any treated area that turns noticeably darker or lighter than the skin around it — that last one matters especially here, because the systematic review of PIH in skin of colour found robust evidence lacking across treatment groups. Seek emergency care for breathing difficulty, fainting, or sudden swelling of the lips, mouth, tongue or throat. Before travelling home, ask how to reach the clinic from abroad and who reviews photographs if something changes after your flight.
How often do these appointments repeat, and does a course have to finish before I fly home?
Intervals are set by the clinic rather than by any published schedule, since the procedures involved have not been standardised in trials the guideline could use. What the sources do establish is where the continuous work sits: the strongly recommended medications are used daily or taken over weeks to months, and that part of a plan travels with you. So the planning question is not how many care sessions fit into a trip, but which parts genuinely require you to be in the room and which parts continue at home. Agree in advance how the medication side is prescribed and reviewed after you leave, and confirm whether a package priced as a course expires if you cannot complete it.
Is there anything I should disclose before a care session?
Yes — tell the clinic everything you are currently using or taking for your skin, including products started at home, and say if you have a history of pigment changes after inflammation or procedures. That last point is not incidental: the 2024 systematic review of PIH in skin of colour covered 48 studies and 1,356 participants across Fitzpatrick III to VI and found robust evidence lacking across all treatment groups, so a clinician needs your own history where the literature is thin. Mention recent sun exposure, any active skin infection, and anything you have had done recently elsewhere. Whether any of it changes the session is a clinical decision, but it cannot be made from information you did not give.
Is a care item lower risk simply because it is gentler?
Gentler in description does not translate into lower risk in the record, because for most of these items the record is thin rather than reassuring. The 2024 guideline could not develop recommendations for peels, light and laser devices, microneedling or lesion extraction, and a procedure with too little evidence to be recommended also has too little evidence to be characterised for harms. One specific signal does exist and points the other way: the systematic review of PIH in skin of colour associated chemical peels with increased adverse events compared with alternative options. Compare what is actually documented about each item rather than inferring safety from how mild it sounds.
If a device is exempt from 510(k), does that mean it is unregulated?
No — exempt describes the route to market, not an absence of rules. Powered dermabrasion brushes fall under product code GFE at 21 CFR 878.4820, a Class I classification exempt from 510(k), which means the manufacturer files no premarket submission and the agency therefore reviews neither effectiveness nor indications for that class. General requirements still apply to the class; what is missing is any product-specific assessment. And this is a description of US market entry only, so it tells you nothing about how the same equipment is registered in Korea or in your own country. Ask the clinic for the model name and the registration that applies where you are being treated.
How do I compare acne care packages between clinics?
Itemise before you compare anything, because packages are assembled differently and the headline is not a common unit. Establish how many sessions are included and over what period, exactly which steps each session contains, whether extraction is inside the package or added, whether an acid is applied and which one at what concentration, whether a consultation and any follow-up assessment are included, and whether medication is part of the plan or billed separately as a prescription. A package built around routine care and a plan built around prescribed medication answer different questions, so setting the two totals side by side compares nothing useful until the contents match.
Who is an acne care programme actually for?
That is decided at an in-person assessment, and the sources here frame the decision rather than settle it. The guideline points a plan for acne itself toward medication first, with peels, light and laser devices, microneedling and lesion extraction all left without a recommendation in either direction — so a care programme is better understood as something that may sit alongside a diagnosed plan than as the plan. If your main concern is the marks left after lesions have healed rather than the lesions themselves, say so, because the review covering PIH in skin of colour found robust evidence lacking across treatment groups and flagged increased adverse events with chemical peels. Bring your treatment history, your current products and medications, and your travel dates so that sequence can be judged along with suitability.
How Abijou works
We started in Gangnam in 2006 and the network now runs 17 branches across Korea. The line we work to is skin transformation woven into everyday life — care you can keep up with, rather than one dramatic change.
- Across the 17 branches in Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon and Busan: over 1,000 medical professionals and more than 350 certified medical devices
- Authentic products only, in appropriate amounts — the treatment is fitted to the condition, not to a package
- Prices are quoted from each branch’s published price list as it stands
Contact and location
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- 1544-0377
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There is no inquiry form on this page. Once you have picked a branch above, open that branch’s site or the official reservation center and choose a time yourself.
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