Water Henna Wins Gold at Korea's Women's Invention Contest
Water Henna won both the Gold Prize and a Minister's Award at the 18th Korea International Women's Invention Contest — and here is what the patent behind it actually changes for you.
This is something that happened in May of last year, and I am only now setting it down, carefully.
I hesitated over this post for a long time. On 24 May 2025, Water Henna received both the Gold Prize and the Minister of Gender Equality and Family Award at the 18th Korea International Women's Invention Contest — and yet, for some reason, I found it difficult to bring the story up. The moment you write "we won an award," it can read as boasting, so I kept putting it off until a full year had quietly gone by.
Over time, though, I kept hearing the same questions from customers. Why should I trust Water Henna? Why is it a little more expensive than other hennas? What actually makes it different? At first I answered each person individually, but after repeating the same explanation many times, it struck me that this was not a post meant to boast — it was an explanation I owed, at least once and properly, to the people who choose to trust us.
So, with a little embarrassment but also genuine gratitude, I will set it down.
The award, in fact, did not go to the Water Henna brand. It went to a technology, now registered as Patent No. 10-2836178, "Henna and indigo natural hair-dye kit, and its manufacturing and dyeing method." The name is a mouthful, but in plain terms it is a patent for turning powder henna into a liquid kit.
Anyone who has used henna will recognise this. The greatest difficulty with conventional powder henna was never the colour — it was the process. You measure out the powder, add water little by little to find the right consistency, work the lumps loose, and negotiate the narrow line between a paste too thick to spread and one too thin to stay put. You are tired before the dyeing has even begun. Customers told us as much, again and again: "Henna is wonderful, but it is simply too much trouble." It was never a dislike of the ingredients; repeating that process every three or four weeks was the hard part.
So we kept returning to a single question: could we leave the natural part exactly as it is, and make only the use of it easier? Water Henna is the answer we arrived at.
Having set all this down, I realise it has quietly turned into praise for our own product, which is a little embarrassing — though I hope it reads instead as the quiet pride of people who made something they genuinely care for.
The Two Awards, Together
The Gold Prize is a separate special award, certificate no. 2025-005. The Minister of Gender Equality and Family Award was given in the government-ministry special award category, with Cha Mi-kyung, CEO of O&S, named as the recipient. We had not expected to receive both at a single contest, so when the name was read out a second time at the ceremony, our CEO stood there rather taken aback.
What an Award Does Not Prove
One point is worth stating plainly. An award means the invention passed a judging panel — it does not mean the product suits everyone's hair. Henna still works by depositing colour onto grey, so it cannot lift dark hair lighter, and on hair damaged by bleach or chemical dye the colour can come out weaker. A patent changes none of that. What the award does tell you is narrower, and more useful: this approach did not exist before, and that judgement was made by a panel rather than by us.
The Evidence That Stays on Paper
Beyond the awards, everything we point to can be checked against a document. We completed the MFDS functional-cosmetic review and hold the review certificate and filing receipt. Human application testing returned a clinical irritation score of 0.0. The product contains zero chemical pigments, with all eleven ingredients published in full, and heavy-metal testing found no lead, arsenic or cadmium. To that we add selection for a national R&D project.
Anyone can print the word "natural" on a pouch. That is precisely why we let test reports and registration numbers speak instead. This award is simply one more line on that list. The full development story is in our journal.