Yu-Su-Ru: The Thousand-Year-Old Japanese Ritual TikTok Keeps Reinventing

Every few years a skincare idea goes viral and gets treated as new. Rice-water ice cubes are the current one. The rinse-water part is old. How old, and what people did with it, is less certain than most articles, including an earlier version of this one, make out.

We went back to check what could be verified. Quite a lot of what we had written could not. This is the corrected version.

Home-remedy note: this article is about history and culture, not medical advice. A long tradition shows that people valued a practice. It doesn’t show that the practice does what is claimed for it.

What can be documented: Heian hair

The Heian period is the era of Japanese court culture conventionally dated 794 to 1185. The best source we could verify for rice water in that court is a 2010 abstract by Japanese cosmetic scientists, who had researched the history of Japanese women’s hair care before running their own tests. They wrote that “the court ladies of the Heian Period, whose beautiful long hair, called suberakashi, reached to the floor, were said to have combed their hair each day using Yu‐Su‐Ru (rinse water obtained from the washing of rice)” [Inamasu et al. 2010].

Three things about that sentence.

It’s about hair. The verified tradition is a hair-combing practice. We found nothing we could check that describes Heian women using it on their faces.

“Were said to have.” The scientists are reporting a tradition. They aren’t quoting a diary or a court record, and neither can we. We looked for a primary source and didn’t find one; it is listed among the things we could not verify.

The name. Yu-su-ru is the word they use for the rinse water itself. An earlier version of this page translated it and gave it in Japanese script. We couldn’t verify either, so both are gone.

The same abstract includes a detail the romantic versions leave out. When the researchers treated hair with the rinse water alone, “flaking was observed on the hair surface”, and they went on to work with extracts instead. The traditional method, tried in a modern lab, left residue.

What we used to say and have removed

In the interest of showing our working, these claims were on this page until November 2026 and have been taken down because we could not find a source we could fetch and quote:

• That rice water was a documented part of geisha skincare.
• That fermented, aged rice water was preferred “consistently across Japanese, Korean and Chinese traditions”.
• That traditional use was “periodic rather than daily”. The one verified source says daily, for hair.
• That Heian women were unknowingly applying a specific list of active compounds. No one has measured what is in rinse water from polished rice.
• A count of yeast strains screened in the SK-II story, and figures for the brand’s revenue and price.
• A romanised Korean term that was simply wrong.

Any of these may be true. If you can point us to a source, we’d like to see it.

The sake brewery story

The other pillar of rice-water lore is modern. As the brand’s history is usually told, “it was observed that elderly workers at a sake brewery had smooth, clear and young-looking hands”, and then: “A yeast extract that the company calls Pitera was eventually isolated for cosmetic use and the brand was launched in the early 1980s.” [Wikipedia, SK-II]

That is an origin story, told by a company about its own product and repeated in an encyclopedia. It may well be true. It is also about yeast. The ingredient, Galactomyces ferment filtrate, is produced by one cultured organism, and its research consists of cell-culture work [Takei et al. 2015] and a year-long study of branded products carried out by the company’s staff [Miyamoto et al. 2023].

It’s common to draw a line from the Heian court through to this essence and on to a jar of rice water fermenting on your counter. We used to draw it too. The pieces don’t join: a hair rinse reported from the tenth century, a yeast filtrate commercialised in the twentieth, and a kitchen ferment that has not been studied at all.

Korea, and the wider region

Korean has an everyday word for the water rice is rinsed in, 쌀뜨물 (ssal-tteu-mul), a kitchen term. Modern Korean brands sell rice toners and rice-ferment products, and our comparison of ferment essences looks at several by their published ingredient lists.

What we can’t do is give you a verified history of rice water as Korean or Chinese skincare. A dermatology review says only that “Rice has been used for cosmetic purposes for centuries” [Zamil et al. 2022], and a review of rice for hair describes rice bran extracts as “part of cultural skin and hair care practices in Asia” [Hashemi et al. 2022]. Those are scientists gesturing at a tradition, not documenting one. A fuller history is a job for historians, and we’d rather leave a gap than fill it with something that sounds right.

What is new

The ice cube. Freezing rice water and rubbing it on the face appears, as far as we can tell, to be a product of social media in the last few years. We can’t date it precisely and haven’t found anyone who has.

That’s not a criticism. Home remedies have always changed as kitchens changed, and an ice-cube tray is a kitchen tool like any other. It only means the cube can’t borrow the age of the rinse.

Does a long tradition mean it works?

A tradition tells you people found something worth repeating. It may be pleasant, cheap or tied to a sense of care. It doesn’t tell you the specific effects now claimed for it are real. The first modern study of rice water on skin begins by noting that “The skin healing benefits of rice have been known for centuries” and, in the same abstract, that “no scientific evidence supports their role in skincare products.” [Marto et al. 2018] Both statements can be true together.

What the research does and doesn’t show is laid out in the evidence register and in rice water for face.

Using it with some respect for the record

1. Say where it comes from, as far as is known. “A Japanese hair-care tradition” is accurate. “An ancient geisha beauty secret” is a marketing line.
2. Don’t claim to have discovered it. Nobody on your feed did.
3. Don’t claim the tradition proves the benefits. It doesn’t.
4. If you’re curious about the original use, it was hair. That’s also where a little more research exists [Hashemi et al. 2022].

The bottom line

The rinse is old and the ice is new. What can be documented is narrower than the legend: Heian court ladies who were said to comb rice rinse water through their hair, and a twentieth-century company story about sake brewers’ hands. The rest is tradition as commonly retold, and this site would rather tell you that than pass it on as history.