Glass Skin and Snail Mucin: South Korea’s Journey to Global Beauty Power

In 1991, four years after joining Amorepacific, his family’s South Korean beauty conglomerate, Suh Kyungbae traveled to France to figure out why the company’s skin care line was selling so poorly there.

He found the products collecting dust at run-down French drugstores. Mr. 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 realized that having a brand that is recognized in the market is very important,” said Mr. Suh, 62, now the chairman 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 skin care routines and snail mucin serum — are online fodder.

South Korea surpassed the United States to become the world’s second-largest cosmetics exporter, after France, in the first half of 2025. Cosmetics exports surged 15 percent in the six-month period, to a record $5.5 billion, fueled by growth in the United States 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.

Once a niche segment, Korean beauty products are thoroughly mainstream, with a large presence at retailers like Sephora and Walmart in the United States, as well as major stores across Europe. The American chain Ulta Beauty, which has more than 1,400 U.S. stores, 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 America next year, in Los Angeles.

This has created opportunities for Amorepacific’s 31 brands, including Laneige and the luxury skin care 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 skin care” 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 Suh Kyungbae’s father.

The founding date was when Suh Sungwhan was officially discharged from the Japanese Army. Like many Korean men, he was conscripted to serve during World War II as part of Japan’s colonial rule. After being released from his post in China, he returned to Kaesong, a city now part of North Korea, to take over the family business his mother had started, which made and sold hair treatment oils, as well as lotions and creams.

He renamed the company Taipyungyang Hwahak, which translates to Pacific Chemical. He moved the company to Seoul in 1947, but it temporarily evacuated to the southeastern port city of Busan during the Korean War to escape the fighting.

In the 1960s, the company grew rapidly in South Korea by selling cosmetics door to door, employing legions of war widows who became known as “Amore Ladies.” It started selling cosmetics outside South Korea in 1964, but didn’t gain much traction for several decades until another export from the country took off.

“It is with the development of culture that the beauty industry can also develop,” said Suh Kyungbae, who took over as Amorepacific’s chief executive in 1997. “Culture, beauty, food and fashion all cross-pollinate.”

As global audiences get a window into life in South Korea through movies and television shows, they are introduced to the age-defying skin of Korean celebrities, as well as the country’s cosmetic products and elaborate skin care routines.

Amorepacific’s first major overseas expansion delivered mixed results. When China’s economy opened in the early 2000s, the company seized the opportunity by building a factory in Shanghai and opening hundreds of stores.

For more than a decade, Amorepacific’s investment paid off. The company enjoyed brisk sales in China until it became collateral damage in a geopolitical feud over the deployment of an American missile defense system in South Korea, a move the Chinese government opposed. Chinese consumers responded by boycotting products from South Korean companies and protesting outside their stores.

In the United States, trendsetters and early adopters, especially those with personal connections to South Korean culture, started embracing Korean beauty products about 10 years ago, said Charlotte Cho, a founder of Soko Glam, an e-commerce website specializing in K-beauty products.

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 United States 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 United States.

Just as K-beauty was taking off in America, it faced a new challenge in President Trump’s import tariffs.

South Korea reached a finalized deal with Mr. Trump last month for a 15 percent tariff rate, down from the initial 25 percent 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,” Mr. Suh said. “We need to make our products better, and we might find a way to try to produce locally inside the U.S.”

The tariffs have done little to slow the momentum of 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 “No. 1 dermatologist-recommended brand in Korea” for sensitive skin. (Both are Amorepacific brands.) A sunscreen from Beauty of Joseon, an independent skin care brand, offered “Cult-favorite 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 country’s skin care industry is highly competitive. South Koreans spend more on beauty products per capita than residents of any other country in the world. However, trends come and go quickly, creating opportunities for start-up brands to break through with new ingredients or technologies.

The number of licensed sellers of cosmetic brands in South Korea nearly doubled, to about 28,000, in 2024 from five years earlier.

Many upstart brands are pushing the envelope with innovative ingredients. The current buzz centers on products using fragments of DNA extracted from salmon or trout sperm, called polydeoxyribonucleotide, or PRDN, and exosomes, which are microscopic bubbles secreted by cells that can aid in healing or calming skin.

When snail mucin — a viscous fluid secreted by snails — became popular in skin care products several years ago, Amorepacific paid roughly $700 million through a series of transactions to acquire COSRX, a smaller South Korean brand that popularized the ingredient for cosmetics in overseas markets.

For decades, Amorepacific has infused natural Asian ingredients into cosmetics. Suh Sungwhan, the founder, believed that ginseng, a plant revered in traditional Korean medicine for its healing powers, could benefit both the skin and the inner workings of the body.

Amorepacific introduced its first ginseng product, ABC Ginseng Cream, in 1966. When the company increased the concentration of ginseng, it caused skin irritation in some customers. Over time, the company developed ways to address the issue for different skin types.

To this day, Amorepacific’s researchers study the best ways to cultivate ginseng, a notoriously fickle plant. It will burn under direct sunlight and grows best on an angled slope of five to 15 degrees. It is harvested every four years, meaning that farmers need to protect it from pests, harsh weather and hungry animals.

The pearl of the ginseng plant is a chemical component called saponin, which helps with anti-aging. The company’s researchers devote themselves to maximizing and optimizing the saponin through countless experiments. Studies of ginseng date back thousands of years in Asia, but many aspects of the plant remain a mystery.

The company recently discovered that there was a high concentration of a saponin found to be effective for restoring hair growth within ginseng leaves, usually a discarded part of the plant.

“There’s still so much we don’t know,” said Cho Jeong Hun, a principal researcher at Amorepacific’s research and innovation center.

Now, the company’s luxury line, Sulwhasoo, has ginseng serums, lotions and eye creams. They come with a hefty price tag: One ginseng anti-aging serum retails for $215.

The promise of flawless skin continues to draw customers to Korean cosmetics. Some are even traveling 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 walks.

“I was talking with my friends — anti-aging, tightening, anti-wrinkles, anything to keep us looking young is what we want,” she said. “ And they told me about Korean beauty products.”