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RIIZE debuted in 2023 and now hold four million-selling releases, a genre they named themselves, and a single that reached US Top 40 radio. Here is who the six RIIZE members are, what the 2026 comeback changed, and where the group actually sits in fifth-generation K-pop.

There is a technique in Korean soup shops called toryeom (토렴), and I think about it more than is reasonable. The cook puts cooled rice in a bowl, ladles hot broth over it, pours the broth back into the pot, and repeats that four or five times until the rice comes up to temperature. That is the entire method. It exists because rice used to be made once a day in one big pot, so it could not stay hot, and soup was how you brought cold food back to warm.

In South Korea, skin barrier repair is not a marketing phrase. It is a legal category. Since August 2020, the enforcement rule of Korea's Cosmetics Act has listed, among eleven classes of functional cosmetics (기능성화장품, gineungseong hwajangpum), products that help improve itching by restoring the function of the skin barrier. The rule even defines the barrier for you: the epidermis of the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of skin. A brand that wants to print that claim has to file safety and efficacy data with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety first.

Every November the internet produces another few hundred lists of desserts that supposedly break from tradition. Open one. It is pumpkin, in a bar. Open the next. It is pecan, in a cookie. The pan changes. The pantry never does.

In March, a song from a Netflix cartoon won an Oscar. "Golden," from KPop Demon Hunters, had picked up a Grammy a few weeks earlier, making it the first K-pop song to win either. For a lot of American listeners, that was the moment K-pop stopped being a genre they had heard about and became one they had actually heard.

Seoul has four famous night views, and nearly every English-language guide lists all four as though you could pick by coin flip. You cannot. One needs a ticket that went on sale two weeks before you arrive. Two of them close on Mondays. One costs a thousand won and one costs about twenty dollars.

Green tea, centella and mugwort. The botanicals that anchor most Korean vegan formulas were never animal-derived to begin with.

Samgyetang arrives still bubbling in a black earthenware pot, with kkakdugi and a dish of salt on the side.

A Korean body scrub is not a massage. Nobody floats lavender past your nose while a harp plays. You soak for fifteen minutes, someone comes in with a green mitt, and then a visible quantity of you leaves your body and sits on the mat next to you.