Over a weekend in October, more than 4,000 people lined up for hours at skincare brand Glow Recipe’s 10th anniversary pop-up in Los Angeles. Styled after a Korean night market, attendees will be greeted with Korean snacks, samples of the newly released Watermelon Glow Jelly sheet mask, and sweatshirts, hats, and keychains reminiscent of Blackpink merchandise upon entering. I was able to enter it. The words “Glow Recipe” printed on the product and displayed in neon against a backdrop of lanterns have been transliterated into Korean for the first time.
“Ten years ago, I don’t think people would have thought it was cool to have a product in Korean,” said Sara Lee, co-founder and co-CEO of Glow Recipe. Ta. “It wasn’t what we imagined.”
Not too long ago, retailers were cutting back on K-beauty products and brands were hearing from investors who believed K-beauty was a trend that had passed its peak. The founders say they never actively distanced themselves from K-beauty, but were focused on other aspects of branding, such as product effectiveness.
But lately, it’s been making a comeback, with Gen Z shoppers and TikTok helping to revive the category. Earlier this month, Zen I Met You, a skincare brand jointly conceived by South Korean beauty e-tailer Soko Glam, was launched. Founder Charlotte Cho made her debut at Sephora, featuring the brand in a “Korean Glass Skin” promotion on the homepage. Peach & Lily is now included in Ulta Beauty’s online K-Beauty section, as Ulta Beauty has renewed interest in the category. Chief Merchandising Officer Monica Arnauld predicts continued growth for K-beauty this year. Cho, who founded Soko Glam in 2012 and met six years later, credits the resurgence of Korean skin care in large part to TikTok.
“This topic has been around for over a decade, but it’s being reinvented and digested for a new Gen Z audience,” she said.
These brands are publicly embracing their roots once again, testing the theory that K-beauty is a category, not a trend, and one that’s only growing.
shaping skin care
Lee and her co-founder and co-CEO Christine Chang, and Cho and Peach & Lily founder and CEO Alicia Yoon, are credited with sparking the 2010s K-beauty craze in the US. He is one of the entrepreneurs at the base. Then retailers scrambled to stock their shelves with trending brands. Peach & Lily, then a multi-brand e-tailer, curated the K-beauty sections of Sephora, Target, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, CVS, Macy’s and more. Glow Recipe and Peach & Lily released their own products in 2017 and 2018, respectively. This is because the founders tried to differentiate between their own brand and curation of imported products.
But every time Korean products became a hit, many international brands launched their own versions of oil cleansers, essences, and serums. The retailer’s selection of Korean brands decreased from 2019 to 2023, and Korean beauty-specific marketing was replaced by common multi-step skin care routine concepts such as double cleansing.
In the early days of the K-beauty craze, “it was so innovative that retailers were like, ‘We want this, this, this, and that,'” Yun said. But retailers quickly weeded out many of their brands, with Sephora dropping at least 10 brands, including Too Cool for School and Amorepacific. Meanwhile, investors have also begun to shy away from K-beauty-specific branding, as American startups have started adopting Korean trends such as jit stickers more quickly before expanding globally.
“When we were raising money,[investors]were like, ‘Do we need to present as K-beauty?’ Is this just a trendy thing?” said David Yee, founder of US-based skincare brand Good Light. The brand is stocked at Ulta Beauty and is branded as “gender-inclusive Korean beauty products formulated for sensitive skin.” “And I thought, ‘My culture is not a trend.'”
As Lee explained, investors are cautious about brands that appear to be trend-driven, and are concerned about whether “the brand itself has longevity – a very strong DNA, a truly differentiated vision.” spoke. In 2019, Glow Recipe closed its multi-brand store operations and focused solely on skincare brands.
When Cho released “Then I Met You,” he decided not to sell it at Soko Glam for a year. “We are not a ‘K-beauty brand’ or a ‘Soco Glam brand.’ We are a skincare brand inspired by my life’s work,” she wrote on her skincare blog The Klog. “Being independent allowed us to stand on our own as our own brand,” she told Business of Beauty.
From trends to categories
Thanks to TikTok, the lull in K-beauty in the US won’t last long, with trends like glass skin, sunscreen, and slugging creating a new craze for the category in 2023, with Cosrx, Beauty of Joseon, and TirTir Sales of Korean brands such as , Laneige and others increased. Amorepacific, the South Korean conglomerate that owns luxury skin brand Sulwhasoo and cult lip mask maker Laneige, has increased investment in marketing, mainly in North America, to make up for lagging sales in China.
Retailers are also getting in on K-beauty again. Ulta Beauty has installed K-beauty endcaps in more than 150 stores and added six new Korean brands to its assortment this fall. Peach & Lily has taken to social media to highlight its role in creating the “glass skin” trend that has taken TikTok by storm. “Then I Met You” will eventually be launched in Soko Glam and focuses on ingredients like ginseng used in Korean traditional medicine.
Even people who aren’t really into K-beauty themselves are associated with it. Hero Cosmetics has earned a spot in Ulta Beauty’s K-beauty site section thanks to products like Jit Stickers and Rescue Balm for sluggers. Hero doesn’t actively identify itself as a K-beauty brand, even though it takes inspiration from K-beauty products and a few search engine-optimized blog posts about Korean skincare trends. Not yet.
For the founders, this new wave shows that Korean beauty’s influence extends far beyond one-off viral products.
“This is an evolution of a category that came and never left. It’s here to stay, but it’s maturing,” Yun said. “If it was a trend and it went away, we wouldn’t be here today still talking about Korean beauty.”
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