Eighty-seven ingredients. That is the first thing to know about this shampoo, and it tells you who wrote it. A hair chemist building a bonding shampoo would stop somewhere around thirty: water, a surfactant system, a few conditioning polymers, preservatives, fragrance, the hero, done. A skincare company building its first shampoo brings its whole vocabulary along, and so this list runs through five ceramides with cholesterol and phytosphingosine, eighteen free amino acids, four forms of hyaluronic acid, niacinamide, panthenol, caffeine, biotin, oat peptide, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, soluble collagen and a kelp extract, all in the back half, all at trace levels, all headed for the drain within a minute of application. COSRX has been formulating faces since 2013 and was bought by Amorepacific in 2023; the Peptide-132 line, announced in June 2025, is its first hair care, and the shampoo reads exactly like a face-cream brand's idea of what hair should be fed.
None of that makes it a bad shampoo. Strip away the tail and what remains is a competent, modern, sulfate-free cleanser. Sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate leads, which matters: it is sulfate-free in the technical sense but it is a strong anionic surfactant that foams generously and removes oil thoroughly, closer in feel to a conventional shampoo than to the gentle glucoside washes that sulfate-free usually implies. It is softened by disodium laureth sulfosuccinate, cocamidopropyl betaine, a glucoside, lauryl hydroxysultaine and two amino-acid surfactants, so the lather is dense and creamy rather than harsh, but an oily scalp will be very clean after this and a bleached, porous head of hair washed daily may feel thoroughly cleaned rather than cushioned. Three cationic conditioning polymers, polyquaternium-10, polyquaternium-6 and guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride, deposit on the negatively charged damaged sections of the hair as the foam rinses, and they are the reason the hair feels slippery in the shower and combs through easily afterwards. That deposition, not anything peptide-shaped, is what a user experiences as the strands being smoothed and strengthened, and it is a well-understood, well-liked technology.
The hero, Tripeptide-132 HCl, is forty-first. It sits behind the fragrance, behind the declared allergen hexyl cinnamal, behind the biotin. COSRX patented it in Korea in 2024 and describes it as a low-molecular-weight sequence designed to bind damaged keratin in the cortex, and the brand says the line was clinically tested, though no design, sample size or result has been published. Whatever the peptide does as a leave-on, a rinse-off shampoo is the worst possible vehicle for it: a minute of contact, a surfactant load built to lift things off the hair, and a position on the list that puts it at a fraction of a percent. Small peptides and hydrolysed proteins can penetrate the hair fibre, and the research on hydrolysed keratin shows lower molecular weights get furthest in, but that work uses leave-on exposure and meaningful concentrations. In a shampoo the honest expectation is that the peptide is a name on the bottle, and the treatment and oil serum in the same line are where a bonding claim would have to be earned.
The scalp-care claim is worth reading with the same care. The brand pitches the shampoo for itchiness, flakes and excess oil, and the list does carry piroctone olamine, zinc PCA and sodium salicylate. Piroctone olamine is a genuine anti-dandruff antifungal with good comparative trial data against zinc pyrithione, but at a working dose it sits near the top of a formula and is usually declared as such; here it is twenty-ninth, behind the preservatives, at a level that keeps a scalp feeling fresh rather than treats seborrhoeic flaking. Zinc PCA mildly tempers sebum, and sodium salicylate at this position adjusts pH rather than exfoliates. The combination makes the shampoo scalp-friendly for an oily or mildly flaky head; it does not make it an anti-dandruff shampoo, and anyone with real dandruff should keep a medicated one in rotation.
In the shower, it is pleasant. The liquid is pale gold and medium-thick, lathers fast, spreads down the lengths without effort and rinses clean without squeak. The ivy scent the brand describes is a light green floral, clear in the steam and close to nothing once the hair dries, and the reviews on the brand's store, 207 of them averaging 4.9 after fifteen months, repeatedly single out the softness after the first wash and the light scent, with a few users with dry or fine hair noting it can be a strong clean. The line charted as an Amazon number one new release within days of launch, according to the brand's own press release, so there is a larger unverified review base there. Fifteen months is enough to say the shampoo is well liked and not enough to say anything about breakage over time.
At thirty dollars for 400 ml it is priced like a salon-adjacent shampoo, with 200 ml at nineteen and 100 ml at twelve, and the large bottle is fairly good value per millilitre for a sulfate-free, silicone-free formula with three conditioning polymers. What the money does not buy is the peptide doing anything, or the ceramides, or the amino acids, and a buyer who understands that is paying for a good wash and a well-designed bottle. A fragrance-sensitive scalp should note the parfum and the hexyl cinnamal; a dry or heavily bleached head should plan to wash every second day.
As a first hair product from a face-care brand, it is better than it needed to be and less than its label implies. It cleans thoroughly, conditions as it rinses, leaves hair soft and a scalp fresh, and it does all of that with ordinary, proven shampoo chemistry while wearing an eighty-seven-ingredient costume. Buy it as a good sulfate-free shampoo with a slight bias toward oily scalps and damaged lengths, and let the peptide be the treatment's problem.
