South Korean beauty products on display at Bloomingdales in New York. Once a niche segment, K-beauty is now thoroughly a mainstream. Photo: The New York Times
In 1991, four years after joining Amorepacific, his family’s South Korean beauty conglomerate, Suh Kyungbae travelled to France to figure out why the company’s skincare line was selling so poorly there.
He found the products collecting dust at run-down French drugstores.
Suh decided to pull the items off the shelves. He did not want to risk undermining Amorepacific’s image in France, the birthplace of the modern cosmetics industry.
“I realised that having a brand that is recognised in the market is very important,” said Kyungbae, 62, now the chair of Amorepacific.
“At that time, Korean brands weren’t strong enough.”
Those days are long gone. Riding the cultural wave of South Korean music, movies and television shows, even food, the country’s beauty products are thriving.
South Korean beauty trends – including glass skin, multistep skincare routines and snail mucin serum – are online fodder.
South Korea surpassed the US to become the world’s second-largest cosmetics exporter, after France, in the first half of 2025.
Cosmetics exports surged 15% in the six-month period, to a record US$5.5bil (approximately RM22.9bil), fuelled by growth in the US and Europe, according to data from the South Korean government.
Amorepacific is being transformed from domestic stalwart to export powerhouse.
Last year, the company’s sales to the West, which includes North America and Europe, more than doubled.
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Once a niche segment, South Korean beauty products are thoroughly mainstream, with a large presence at retailers like Sephora and Walmart in the US, as well as major stores across Europe.
The US chain Ulta Beauty, which has more than 1,400 stores there, said in July that it was expanding its K-beauty offerings.
South Korea’s biggest cosmetics chain, Olive Young, plans to open its first store in the US next year, in Los Angeles.
This has created opportunities for Amorepacific’s 31 brands, including Laneige and the luxury skincare line Sulwhasoo, to reach more consumers.
And while Amorepacific is a beneficiary, it is also a target. Hundreds of smaller South Korean brands are jostling to stand out with new products featuring innovative ingredients or new technologies.
Even products from lesser-known brands spread quickly on social media.
On TikTok, posts about “K-beauty” or “Korean skincare” garner 250 million views on average per week, according to Spate, a consumer data firm.
When Amorepacific was founded on Sept 5, 1945, the notion of South Korea’s becoming a global power in the cosmetics industry would have been unimaginable – even to the company’s founder, Suh Sungwhan, who is Kyungbae’s father.
Demand for K-beauty products internationally blossomed alongside the country’s cultural wave, known as “Hallyu” in Korean, in the late 1990s, when South Korean television shows started gaining popularity in Asia.
Customers sample lip products at Amore Seongsu, Amorepacific’s flagship store in Seongsu, a trendy area in Seoul known for fashionable boutiques and cafes. Photo: The New York Times
Over the past decade, musical acts like BTS and Blackpink, television shows like Squid Game and this year’s summer blockbuster, KPop Demon Hunters, have vaulted the country’s cultural exports to new heights of global popularity.
“It is with the development of culture that the beauty industry can also develop,” said Kyungbae, who took over as Amorepacific’s CEO in 1997.
“Culture, beauty, food and fashion all cross-pollinate.”
As global audiences get a window into life in South Korea through films and television shows, they are introduced to the age-defying skin of South Korean celebrities, as well as the country’s cosmetic products and elaborate skincare routines.
In the US, trendsetters and early adopters, especially those with personal connections to South Korean culture, started embracing K-beauty products about 10 years ago, said Charlotte Cho, a founder of Soko Glam, an e-commerce website specialising in K-beauty products.
South Korean brands filled a void between inexpensive drugstore products and legacy offerings sold at department stores.
They offered unique ingredients and technological breakthroughs at better prices. She said items like pimple patches for treating zits and sheet masks provided an affordable entry point.
Amorepacific’s big break in the US came from a mask that’s not really a mask.
The company’s Laneige brand developed a product called Lip Sleeping Mask – more balm than mask – that softens and hydrates lips as users sleep. Beauty influencers and celebrities gushed about the product on social media.
There was a burst of buzzy collaborations and savvy social media posts. Over the past year, one Lip Sleeping Mask was sold every two seconds in the US.
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Just as K-beauty was taking off in the US, it faced a new challenge in president Donald Trump’s import tariffs.
South Korea reached a finalised deal with Trump last month for a 15% tariff rate, down from the initial 25% that the president announced in April.
Amorepacific said that it had absorbed the increase for now, but that it was looking into other ways to make its products.
“The free trade system is slowly fading away,” Suh said. “We need to make our products better, and we might find a way to try to produce locally inside the US.”
The tariffs have done little to slow the momentum of South Korean cosmetics. At the Sephora store in New York’s Times Square in August, there was a wall of beauty products from South Korea.
Skin creams from the Hanyul brand were “holistic Korean skin remedies”. Another label, Aestura, trumpeted that it was the “number one dermatologist-recommended brand in Korea” for sensitive skin (both are Amorepacific brands).
A sunscreen from Beauty Of Joseon, an independent skincare brand, offered “cult-favourite Korean SPF”.
The sector isn’t dominated by one or two players, said Kwon Yoo-jin, a professor of apparel and fashion studies at Korea National Open University.
“K-beauty itself is a cultural brand,” she said.
The promise of flawless skin continues to draw customers to South Korean cosmetics. Some are even travelling to Seoul for the full experience.
Arlene Freeman, 84, was shopping in September for Sulwhasoo products at the brand’s flagship store in Seoul.
She said she regularly discussed South Korean cosmetics with her friends back home in New Jersey during their daily four-mile (6.4km) walks.
“I was talking with my friends – antiageing, tightening, anti-wrinkles, anything to keep us looking young is what we want,” she said.
“And they told me about Korean beauty products.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
