Propelled by interest in all things
South Korea, Amorepacific, the cosmetics giant, is expanding its reach into the
United States. But so are many of its competitors.
Four decades after
struggling to sell in France, Amorepacific—South
Korea’s largest beauty company—has become a symbol of the country’s global
cosmetics boom. Riding the wave of Korean cultural exports in music, film, and
fashion, K-beauty has gone
mainstream, with Amorepacific’s brands like Laneige and Sulwhasoo now featured
at Sephora, Walmart, and Ulta Beauty across the U.S. and Europe.
In the first half of 2025,
South Korea surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s second-largest cosmetics exporter,
after France, with exports up 15%
to a record $5.5 billion. Amorepacific’s sales to Western
markets more than doubled last year.
Founded in 1945 by Suh Sungwhan, who began
by making hair oils and creams after World War II, the company grew through
door-to-door sales by “Amore Ladies.” Under his son Suh Kyungbae, CEO since
1997, Amorepacific transformed into a global player emphasizing innovation,
natural ingredients, and cultural branding.
After early success in
China, geopolitical tensions and the pandemic forced a retreat, prompting
Amorepacific to refocus on the U.S. market. Breakout hits like the Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask,
now selling one every two seconds in the U.S., helped establish its presence.
Despite new U.S. import
tariffs (cut to 15%), the company plans local production to
stay competitive.
The K-beauty sector is now highly fragmented
and innovative, with over 28,000 licensed sellers and hundreds of
start-ups leveraging social media to promote novel ingredients—such as snail mucin, DNA fragments (PDRN),
and exosomes.
Amorepacific has responded with acquisitions (notably COSRX, for $700 million)
and continued investment in ginseng-based
luxury lines like Sulwhasoo.
As Korean beauty
becomes a cultural phenomenon, it embodies the fusion of heritage, science, and pop culture,
turning Seoul into a global destination for skincare tourism.
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.
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. 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 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.
When
the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it dealt another blow to Amorepacific in China.
The company closed most of its stores in the country, leaving a trail of losses
on its bottom line.
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 PDRN, 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.”