Why Korean Women Wear Long Sleeves in Summer (There Are Two Reasons, and Mine Is the Second One)

If you're in Seoul in August, you'll see something that doesn't seem to make sense. It's over 30 degrees, the humidity is the kind that makes a five-minute walk feel like a decision, and a woman walks past you in a long-sleeved cardigan. Not rushing indoors. Just wearing it.

She's not confused about the weather. There are two reasons Korean women do this, and they're completely different from each other. Most people are doing it for the first reason. I'm doing it for the second.

Quick Verdict

> Reason one: not getting tanned. Pale skin still sits high in Korean beauty culture, and covering up beats reapplying sunscreen.
 > Reason two: the air conditioning, which in Korea is genuinely aggressive. This is my reason.
 > The item: we call it sal-an-ta-tem — literally "skin-doesn't-burn item." A thin long sleeve worn over a sleeveless top.
 > If you're visiting: pack one light layer even in August. You will want it indoors.
 > My honest position on the pale-skin thing: I did twenty white tanning sessions. Nothing happened. I stopped.

Full sun, well over 30 degrees, long sleeves.
Not one person around me found this strange.

Reason One: Not Getting Tanned

I'll say the uncomfortable part plainly, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest: Korean women really do want to be pale. Not tan-avoidant in a mild, sun-safety way. Actively, seriously committed to not browning.

And once that's the goal, a cardigan makes more sense than sunscreen does. Sunscreen needs reapplying, sweats off, and gets negotiated with all day. Fabric doesn't. A sleeve is a decision you make once in the morning.

There's a word for these clothes here. We call them sal-an-ta-tem (살안타템) — sal is skin, an ta is doesn't burn, tem is short for item. Skin-doesn't-burn items. It isn't a fashion term or a marketing word. It's just what everyone calls them, which tells you how ordinary the whole thing is.

Where I Landed On That

I've written before about chasing pale skin, but I left out the specifics. Here they are.

In Korea, tanning salons have a whitening section. That is not a mistranslation. You walk into the same shop where people go to get darker, and there is a corner dedicated to the exact opposite — white tanning, we call it. The routine is identical to regular tanning: you put on a lotion, you get into the machine, lying down or standing depending on the model, and you stay there for fifteen minutes. Once a week. It's supposed to undo an existing tan and take your skin lighter from there.

I have no idea how it's meant to work, and I never found out. I just went. Faithfully, once a week, twenty times.

I also did glutathione IV drips — we call those baek-ok-jusa, white jade shots. There was a stretch of years when everyone was doing all of this and swearing by it, so I wasn't exactly an outlier.

None of it made me white. I stayed exactly the color I am. My skin was probably too dark to start with for any of it to show, which is the part I find funny now — I was trying hardest to fix the thing that was least fixable.

So at some point I stopped, and decided to accept myself and get on with it. It helped that the rest of the world doesn't agree with Korea on this at all — plenty of countries read tanned skin as healthy, as evidence of a life lived outdoors. So I've decided to live as though I'm somewhere else. It's a small mental trick, and it works surprisingly well.

Reason Two: Korean Air Conditioning Is Not a Joke

Here's my actual reason, and it has nothing to do with my skin tone.

Air conditioning in Korea is set to a level I can only describe as committed. Public transport is freezing. Restaurants are worse. And film sets — indoor sets especially — are on another level entirely. You walk in from 33 degrees and within twenty minutes you're cold in a way that feels almost personal.

There's a Korean word for what happens next: naeng-bang-byeong (냉방병), which translates roughly to air-conditioning sickness. I don't know a clean English equivalent, and I've never heard anyone outside Korea use a term for it, but every Korean knows exactly what it means.

For me it comes on like a cold. A headache first, and it gets worse as the day goes on, and then that heavy, achy, coming-down-with-something feeling in my whole body. Not dramatic. Just enough to ruin a day, in the middle of summer, from sitting indoors.

So I carry a cardigan. Always, all summer. Off when I'm outside, on the moment I walk into anywhere. It's the single most useful thing in my bag between June and September, and I promise it isn't about the sun.

This one lives in my bag from June to September.
Off outside, on the second I'm indoors.

What It Actually Looks Like

The version I wear most is simple: a sleeveless top underneath, and a very thin, loose, half-sheer long sleeve over it. The outer layer isn't there for warmth in any real sense — it's more like a fabric shade. Thin enough that you don't feel sealed in, long enough that your arms are covered.

That layering is the whole trick, and it's why it doesn't feel unbearable in the heat. You're not wearing a summer outfit plus a jacket. You're wearing a bare outfit that happens to have a screen over it.

You can see straight through it — that's the whole point.
It's a shade, not a layer.

If You Want to Find One

This is genuinely hard to shop for in English, because the category doesn't have an English name. Searching in English mostly turns up generic listings built for export — thin long-sleeved things that happen to exist, rather than the thing Koreans are actually wearing.

If you want the real version, the honest answer is Musinsa. It's where people here actually buy clothes, and the global site is in English and ships internationally. What you'll find there is what's on the street in Seoul this month, which is a different thing entirely from what a search engine thinks Korean summer clothing looks like.

I'm not going to link you to a specific product, and I'd rather say why than quietly skip it. To do that I'd have to send you to something I've never worn. The pieces in these photos are mine and I wear them all summer, but that doesn't make me qualified to point at a page of thumbnails and tell you which one is good.

What matters more than any brand is weight. If it doesn't feel like almost nothing in your hand, it will be miserable in humidity — that's the whole test.

And if you want to know exactly what I'm wearing in any of the photos above, ask me in the comments. I'll tell you.

One Thing to Take With You

If you're coming to Korea in summer, pack one thin long layer. Not because of the sun, and not because of any beauty standard you have no obligation to adopt.

Because you are going to spend a lot of your trip indoors — in cafés, on the subway, in restaurants, waiting somewhere with the air conditioning running hard — and around day three you'll understand why every Korean woman around you is carrying one.

And while you're packing for Seoul's summer, spare a thought for your feet too — there's an invisible rule that decides what Koreans wear down there, and it will meet you at more doorways than you expect.