The secrets behind the South Korean cosmetics boom

Max Kim, Tribune News Service

Jo Min-Su was working toward a computer science doctorate at one of South Korea's best universities when he stumbled on his calling: building a better lip gloss. The 30-year-old sat near his booth at Seoul Beauty Week, pulled out a stick of his brand — named Blup — and gave his upper lip a dewy pink glow-up. "Nobody trusts a founder who doesn't use his own product," he said, smacking his lips. Jo is one of the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs looking to strike it rich on the seemingly insatiable global demand for beauty products from South Korea.

Following in the slipstream of the superstars of K-pop, K-beauty has become a massive global business. Los Angeles fans of South Korean imports flocked to KCON LA 2025 at the LA Convention Center in August. At the music and cultural festival, they saw top K-pop idols and lined up for K-beauty at skin-care booths. The three-day convention — which had more than 350 booths and attracted more than 100,000 people from around LA and the country — was sponsored by South Korean health and beauty giant Olive Young, which plans to open its first US outlet in LA early next year. The secret of K-beauty's success has been the unlikely alliance of big manufacturers and small entrepreneurs to develop and supply a steady stream of new products to consumers and the "skinfluencers" who help them lock in on the latest lotions.

Popular for offering unique and affordable products — like sunscreens that don't leave white smears while doubling as moisturizers — South Korean cosmetics have dominated some social media feeds in recent years. Whether it is Kim Kardashian on Instagram or deals from Walmart or Target, consumers who care about cosmetics are getting constant updates on the ever-changing trends. That online buzz has catapulted South Korea's cosmetics exports to more than $10 billion. Last year, it dethroned France — home of beauty royalty brands such as L'Oréal and L'Occitane — as the biggest exporter of cosmetics to the US. Unlike South Korea's other marquee exports like semiconductors and automobiles, beauty product exports are largely backed by smaller companies. Two-thirds of last year's cosmetics exports came from small and medium-sized firms like Blup, according to the Korea International Trade Assn.

What has emerged is the hope that anyone, with the right product and a little bit of luck, can make a fortune in K-beauty. Since 2013, the number of registered cosmetics sellers in the country has increased sevenfold, to over 27,000 last year. The K-beauty trend took off in Los Angeles and across the country during COVID-19 when people were locked at home, online, thinking about self-care and exploring alternatives to well-known brands, said Sarah Chung Park, the founder and chief executive of Landing International, an LA-based company that connects K-beauty brands to American retailers. "Because of COVID, TikTok really boomed, and I think that was a way for people to discover K-beauty brands and then those brands went on Amazon and converted that virality to sales," she said. "Pretty much every Korean brand has capitalised on that." Behind most of the budding brands is a handful of manufacturers such as Colmar and Cosmax.

The cosmetics manufacturers behind many of the latest brands are largely invisible to ordinary beauty consumers. Unlike other global players like L'Oreal or Estée Lauder, Cosmax has never sold directly under its own name, specialising almost entirely in research and original design manufacturing, or ODM. Cosmax was founded in 1992 and has grown into the largest cosmetics ODM in the world, supplying 4,500 brands from its factories in South Korea, China, the US and Southeast Asia. And at a time when some of the most well-known beauty brands are in decline or stuck in single-digit growth due to consumer fatigue, Cosmax reported a record $1.7 billion in revenue last year — a 22% increase from 2023.

The company is a primary reason why South Korean beauty startups have been able to take off so quickly, flooding global markets at a pace that competitors in other countries struggle to match. Cosmax accounted for around 26% of all of South Korea's cosmetics exports last year. It has a unique ability to develop and launch new products rapidly while still making money supplying even the smallest brands, said Lee Kyung-soo, the company's 79-year-old chairman and founder. "From the point a brand comes to us with an idea, we can supply them in as little as three to six months," he said. "In other markets, that can be anywhere between a year to three years. They just can't compete with South Korea when it comes to speed."

Few clients are too small for Lee, who has made sure that Cosmax will fill custom orders as small as 3,000 units. The company supplies companies with billions of dollars a year in revenue, and also Blup, a three-person lip gloss startup. Kang Seung-hyun, the senior managing director of Cosmax's research unit, estimates that the company releases around 8,000 new products annually. By the end of any given year, each of the company's 1,100 cosmetic scientists will have worked on the development of 80 to 100 cosmetic products, allowing Cosmax and its domestic peers to, as Kang puts it, "carpet-bomb the global market with novel products."