How Glow in Seoul works — and how we make money

No. We never rank clinics or label one “best,” “top,” or “#1.” Every clinic in our directory is presented as a neutral fact: it is registered with Korea’s Ministry of Health to treat foreign patients. That is a verifiable status, not our opinion.

That is why paid advertising is separated from the directory and evidence ledger. A sponsored clinic can buy a clearly labeled placement, but it cannot buy a rank, evidence label, or personalized recommendation.

Glow Plans are currently free. You can build, keep, print, and explicitly share a plan without asking us to recommend a clinic.

Cellinique in Gangnam is a paid advertising partner. Every Cellinique placement is labeled “Paid partner · Advertisement” at the point of display and is kept separate from neutral registry facts and evidence labels.

A sponsored CTA opens cellinique.com directly. Glow does not send the plan, free-text answers, treatment interests, email address, or other contact details to Cellinique. The clinic collects any information itself on its own site under its own notices and consent flow.

The intended commercial model is a media/placement fee, not a per-patient, per-booking, or treatment-value commission. Sponsored impressions and clicks are measured only as aggregate product events and are not treated as medical outcomes.

Everyone else in the directory is listed for free, with no relationship to us, purely as registry facts.

The directory is built from KHIDI’s official open dataset of medical institutions registered to treat foreign patients (data.go.kr, government open data licensed for reuse). We add specialty classification via Naver Place, and enrich addresses, hours, phone numbers, and languages from clinics’ own listings.

Each entry shows what we can verify, with a last-updated date (current snapshot: 2026-06-25). Registration means a clinic is legally cleared and insured to treat foreign patients — it is not a quality ranking, and it doesn’t by itself guarantee English-speaking staff. We always say so, and we link you to the official registry to re-check.

No fake reviews, and no review scores of our own. We don’t write or host star ratings, and we don’t accept paid or fabricated testimonials. For real patient reviews, hours, and photos, we link you straight to each clinic’s Naver Place page, where the information is current and not curated by us.

No. Glow in Seoul is an independent English-language guide, not a clinic and not staffed by doctors. Nothing here is medical advice or a diagnosis. We explain treatments, downtime, and what to ask in plain English, and we help you prepare a clinic-ready consultation. Suitability, the treatment plan, and pricing are always confirmed by a licensed clinic.

Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager (which measures Google Ads conversions) load only if you choose “Allow” in the banner at the bottom of the screen — consent under Article 28-8(1)(1) of Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act. If you don’t allow them, you can still use everything on the site.

• What is collected: a cookie identifier, pages viewed and when, clicks and plan steps (for example, creating a plan or opening a sponsored link), browser and device type, and approximate region inferred from your IP address
• Purpose: to see usage statistics such as visits and clicks so we can improve pages, and to measure Google Ads conversions
• Recipient: Google LLC (Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager) — contact https://support.google.com/policies
• Destination country: United States · When and how: sent over the network each time you view a page after allowing it
• Retention: Google Analytics event data retention of 14 months (our setting), then deleted
• How to refuse and what happens: choose “Not now” in the banner, or change it any time with “Analytics settings” in the footer or below. Refusing does not limit your use of the site.
• Not covered by this setting: the site’s own aggregate event log on our server, and Vercel Web Analytics — a cookieless page-view counter run by Vercel Inc. (US) that stores no cookie and no identifier on your device, identifies a visit only by a hash of the request that is discarded after 24 hours, and records the page, referrer, country/region, browser, OS and device type for aggregate statistics.
• Change history — 2026-09-28: Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager now load only after you allow them; this notice was added. If the transfer details change, we will ask for consent again. 2026-09-28 (second revision): PostHog product analytics and session replay now also load only after you allow them in the same banner (see the next section); visitors who had allowed Google tags only are asked once more.

Analytics settings

PostHog loads only if you choose “Allow” in the same banner (consent under Article 28-8(1)(1) of Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act). Before that, the PostHog script is not loaded and nothing is sent. No feature of the site depends on PostHog, so you can use everything without it.

• What is collected: an anonymous identifier PostHog keeps in your browser (cookie and local storage), pages viewed and when, the referring page, clicks and other interactions (autocapture), plan steps (for example, creating a plan or opening a sponsored link), a session replay of the screen with every form input masked, browser console logs, browser and device type, and approximate region inferred from your IP address
• Purpose: to see where visitors get stuck in the plan flow so we can fix pages
• Recipient: PostHog Inc. (PostHog) — contact privacy@posthog.com
• Destination country: United States (PostHog US Cloud, us.i.posthog.com) · When and how: sent over the network while you use the site, after allowing it
• Retention: session replays 30 days (our setting); events 7 years, the retention of our PostHog paid plan (PostHog documentation). If you ask us, we delete your person and events in PostHog sooner — contact us with the date of your visit
• How to refuse and what happens: choose “Not now” in the banner, or change it any time with “Analytics settings” in the footer or below (refusing later stops capture and recording at once). Refusing does not limit your use of the site.

Analytics settings