For decades, Korean beauty culture was ahead of its time.
The skincare and makeup ethos, now known as K-beauty, arrived in America from South Korea in the 2000s. It appealed largely to customers in Los Angeles who were familiar with an approach to skincare that prioritizes long-term skin health over the aggressive quick fixes sought by many American consumers.
Decades later, Americans have caught on and are so invested in K-beauty brands that South Korea recently supplanted the U.S. as the second-largest exporter of cosmetics after France.
While the early boom of K-beauty products in the 2010s focused on skincare with innovative ingredients like ginseng, snail mucin or salmon sperm, the second wave belongs to color cosmetics. American consumers, sold on the benefits of Korean skincare, are now in full pursuit of cushion foundations, brow pencils that lighten without bleaching and lip colors with a blurred matte finish.
In South Korea, a country where the population is relatively homogenous, finding the right level of diversity to launch a global takeover has presented a challenge.
In the past, K-beauty brands made color products for a small spectrum of skin tones. Now, with growing global demand in emerging markets like India, Latin America, the Middle East-North Africa (countries where phenotypes range from lighter skin to the deepest brown), K-beauty companies are on a mission to become more inclusive.
Diversity and inclusion are dirty words in America these days. While makeup may feel frivolous, it is the combination of beauty, food, fashion and music that creates this thing we call culture.
If we believe, as some do, that South Korea is using its culture in the form of K-pop bands, K-beauty, films like “Parasite” or the Netflix series “Squid Game” as a tool for building national power, then maybe there are lessons to be learned from the South Korean beauty industry.
K-beauty executives aren’t crashing out when they hear the words diversity and inclusion. They are embracing people of color, particularly beauty influencers with broad reach, to help with product development and marketing.
Credit: Kimberly Tran
Credit: Kimberly Tran
Beauty influencer Monica Ravichandran had planned to follow in the footsteps of her parents. Growing up in the Bay Area as the daughter of Indian immigrants, she secured a job as a software engineer when the pandemic changed her path.
The job didn’t happen, but Ravichandran, who spent her teen years fostering a love of makeup, turned to social media to share makeup tutorials. She initially posted creative looks, but a year in, requests from followers who felt ignored by the beauty industry prompted her to build a community specifically for women of color.
In 2022, when she and a friend tried on the same lipstick color to illustrate how makeup looks different depending on the wearer’s skin tone, she hit a nerve. Ravichandran began calling it the “color theory test,” and more than 100 million views later she is still talking about the relationship between skin color, undertone and color cosmetics.
As an Asian woman, she wondered why it was taking the K-beauty industry so long to adapt. “I have been reviewing K-beauty for a real long time, and I never thought they would change,” Ravichandran said when we spoke by phone. “They tried to get in the American market but didn’t understand the nuance of the different shades that are here. America is a land of immigrants, and American audiences are very diverse.”
When K-beauty brand TirTir launched a massive shade extension, it changed the game. K-beauty brands began reaching out to Ravichandran and other influencers for help in developing, testing and marketing foundations and other color products for deeper skin tones.
Ravichandran, who has more than a million social media followers, agreed to work with Espoir, a brand owned by Amorepacific, the beauty conglomerate that sparked America’s taste for K-beauty back in the early 2000s.
Today, Amorepacific holds more than 30 brands, including some of the hottest names in K-beauty: Sulwhasoo, Innisfree, CosRx, Laneige and Etude, and the company has a long-term goal of achieving 70% in overseas sales by “developing products and content tailored to local customer needs” in targetregions including North America, Europe, India and the Middle East.
“American brands say the darker shades don’t sell. It’s honestly annoying,” Ravichandran said. “If you look at the Black and brown dollar, we spend more on beauty products. They just don’t know how to market the product properly.”
Ravichandran helped develop olive-toned shades of Espoir’s cushion foundation suitable for women of color who have found cool undertones to be too red, neutral undertones that look gray and warm undertones that are too yellow or orange.
What brands get wrong, she said, is developing deeper shades without accounting for undertones.
“The biggest issue in the market is there is no standardized system as to what depth and undertone mean,” Ravichandran said. One brand’s cool is another brand’s neutral.
I tried one of Ravichandran’s Espoir colors and it more closely matches my skin tone than some foundations I have worn for years. I was not under the K-beauty spell before, but I’m definitely paying attention now.
The company (and perhaps the country) that strives to get inclusion right is the one that will win converts.
As South Korea aims to have a top-tier global influence and economic success, it is embracing cultural diversity, not limiting it. Inclusion, whether in our makeup or in our culture, doesn’t signal the downfall of society. It is the very spark for innovation and growth.
Read more on the Real Life blog (www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog) and find Nedra on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
