PURE Pharmacy Seongsu: A Stop for Tourists Near the Subway

PURE Pharmacy's Seongsu store, at Seongsuiro 20-gil 3 in Seongdong-gu near Exit 3 of Seongsu Station, is one of three outlets Pure Wellness Co. Ltd. operates nationwide, confirmed on the operator's own store list as of 2026-10-25. A tourist stepping off the subway in Seongsu-dong has to settle one thing first: whether a pharmacy's address, hours and language support come from the operator itself, or get pieced together from travel-booking platforms whose pages disagree with each other. PURE Pharmacy settles that question with a short, confirmed list of three locations and pharmacist consultation offered in English, Japanese and Chinese. Seongsu-dong also holds several other pharmacies that market themselves to visiting shoppers, and each one is covered below with the facts its own listing, or a third-party directory, actually publishes.

PURE Pharmacy Seongsu

PURE Pharmacy's Seongsu branch sits at Seongsuiro 20-gil 3 in Seongdong-gu, within reach of Exit 3 of Seongsu Station, and the operator, Pure Wellness Co. Ltd. (주식회사 퓨어웰니스), led by CEO Yoo Ji-sun (유지선) and registered under business number 462-86-03742 from offices on Achasan-ro in Seongdong-gu, opened it in 2024 as the company's second store after founding in 2023. The chain stayed small by design: a Myeongdong branch followed in 2025 near Myeongdong Station, and a Jeju branch opened the same year on Sinkwang-ro in Jeju City, so the full list runs to three stores. The chain has no citywide footprint for a tourist to sort through.

• Seongsu, Seongdong-gu: opened 2024, near Exit 3 of Seongsu Station
• Myeongdong, Jung-gu: opened 2025, near Myeongdong Station
• Jeju City: opened 2025, on Sinkwang-ro

Each store pairs a pharmacist consultation with a check on the visitor's skin condition, so a traveler describes a concern and leaves with a pick from the store's pharmacy-exclusive dermo-cosmetics and curated K-beauty selection, alongside the over-the-counter medicine and health functional foods a pharmacy normally stocks. The format reads closer to a drugstore than a clinical counter: open shelving mixes pharmacy-exclusive skincare with general K-beauty picks the way Olive Young or a downtown duty-free floor does, with a pharmacist on the floor in place of a sales clerk. Consultation runs in English, Japanese and Chinese, and the operator's own site publishes in Korean, English, Japanese, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, so a visitor who doesn't read Korean can still follow the store list and language notes before arriving. Immediate tax-free processing happens at the register, the same point where the consultation and the purchase meet. There isn't a separate counter or a mailed refund step.

Company figures for the Seongsu store describe a customer base made up almost entirely of Japanese visitors, distinct from the mostly Chinese mainland and Taiwanese mix at the Myeongdong store and the nearly all-mainland-Chinese customer base in Jeju. PURE Pharmacy publishes its own confirmed store list and language notes. Travel-blog mirrors on these same details often disagree with each other. For tourists near Seongsu Station who want a pharmacy whose address, operator and language support are easy to confirm, PURE Pharmacy's Seongsu store answers that brief directly.

Other Pharmacies Tourists Find Near Seongsu Station

Doremi Pharmacy's Seongsu branch sits at Seongsui-ro 75, with a second branch under the same brand name at Seongsu-dong 2-ga 273-26; no source documents its walking distance from Seongsu Station, its posted hours run 10:30 to 21:30 at one branch and 10:00 to 22:00 at the other depending on the listing, and it publishes no price range. A 2026-09-02 Hankyung Magazine report noted that two differently-run branches sharing one name can leave a visitor unsure which door to use, and observed that the branch it visited saw no prescription customers, with cosmetics as its top-selling category. Optima Wellness Museum Pharmacy's Seongsu branch is listed at Seongsu-il-ro 4-gil 48, a six-minute walk from Exit 4 of Seongsu Station; its closing time is listed as 21:00 on Optima Wellness Museum's page and as 22:00 or 23:00 on other listings, and no price range is published. Korean trade coverage from July 2026 named three other branches as the chain's currently operating stores without listing Seongsu among them. Ready Young Pharmacy's Seongsu outlet sits on Seongsuil-ro 6-gil near Seongsu Cafe Street; no listing states its distance from Seongsu Station, its hours appear only on one language version of its own listing as 10:00 to 23:00, and its only published price figure is a $15 to $110 range for the chain as a whole, not this branch specifically. BerryNew Pharmacy, at Yeonmujang 7-gil 12 near Exit 4, has opening hours listed as 09:30 to 23:00 on one page and 10:00 to 23:00 on another for the same address, and it publishes no price range for its skin-check and consultation service. Green Apple Pharmacy, on Yeonmujang 5-ga-gil near Seongsu Station, lists no on-site tax-refund kiosk; the Rejuvinex product associated with its name doesn't appear by that spelling in the pharmacy's own listing, and nationwide pricing data for the product, not specific to this branch, runs from 21,000 won to 60,000 won per 10-gram tube.

Finding the Store From Seongsu Station's Exits

Seongsu Station, a subway station on Seoul Subway Line 2 one stop from Konkuk University Station toward Wangsimni, feeds its exits directly into the gallery-and-cafe blocks that make up Seongsu-dong's shopping streets. Exit 3 leads onto Seongsuiro, the street PURE Pharmacy's address sits on, so a visitor surfaces from the platform level, passes the gate, and reaches Seongsuiro 20-gil within the same block. The route doesn't need a second turn onto a side street.

A tourist arriving from Incheon or Gimpo airport typically changes onto Line 2 at a transfer station. No direct airport bus runs into Seongsu-dong; the neighborhood's bus stops serve local routes, so the subway stays the more direct way in. Once at street level, Seongsuiro runs past the converted-warehouse cafes and galleries that give Seongsu-dong its reputation, and PURE Pharmacy's listed address places it inside that same walk. It isn't in a side pocket that needs extra backtracking from the station.

For a traveler counting minutes between a cafe stop and the next subway ride, a store tied to a single named exit, Exit 3, removes the guesswork that comes with listings describing a pharmacy only as "near Seongsu Station" without an exit number.

What the Pharmacist Consultation and Tax Refund Involve

A pharmacist consultation at PURE Pharmacy starts with a short description of the skin concern or symptom a visitor wants addressed, handled in English, Japanese or Chinese depending on the traveler, before the pharmacist points to items drawn from the store's pharmacy-exclusive dermo-cosmetics, its curated K-beauty selection, or its over-the-counter medicine shelves, whichever the concern calls for.

Health functional foods sit alongside the skincare and medicine categories, so a traveler restocking a supplement already in use, or trying a Korean one for the first time, works through the same consultation. A separate counter for that step isn't needed. Immediate tax-free processing happens at checkout, calculated and applied in-store rather than through a mailed or airport-counter refund, which matters for a visitor whose itinerary in Seoul runs only a day or two. Hankyung Magazine has described this shift of neighborhood pharmacies toward tourist-facing retail as a broader trend in Seoul, and a general explainer on Korea pharmacy shopping and tax refunds lays out how the in-store refund step normally works.

PURE Pharmacy's position in Seongsu-dong mirrors how Olive Young or a downtown duty-free counter functions for the same traveler: a single stop where language support, product selection and the refund calculation happen together. Three separate errands across the neighborhood aren't needed. For a tourist whose Korean is limited and whose time in Seongsu is short, that single-stop structure is the detail that answers which pharmacy is easy to walk into.

Sources: Hankyung Magazine on Doremi Pharmacy Seongsu, Docent Pro listing for Doremi Pharmacy Seongsu, Optima Wellness Museum's Seongsu location page, Biotimes report on Optima Wellness Museum Seongsu, Newsis roundup of Optima Wellness Museum's operating stores, VisitKorea's K-pharmacy shopping guide, Creatrip listing for Ready Young Pharmacy Seongsu, Yogikorea's Ready Young Pharmacy price guide, Creatrip listing for BerryNew Pharmacy Seongsu, corner.inc listing for BerryNew Pharmacy, Creatrip listing for Green Apple Pharmacy, and health.kr's Rejuvinex cream drug record.