PASADENA, Calif.—Seoul is the beauty capital of the world, a tourist destination for cutting-edge facial procedures and low-cost, high-quality skin care products.
Now, Americans won’t have to travel far to find the best in K-beauty.
Olive Young, South Korea’s leading beauty retailer, is opening its first U.S. location this weekend. The brightly lighted, meticulously organized Pasadena store is colorful, spacious and designed to be exactly the kind of place that makes women drop major cash.
Inside, there are stations of SPF lotions, rows of toner pads and scanners that purport to analyze skin and scalp health. Built-in sinks allow shoppers to test face washes that come in creamy, gooey and foaming textures. The back of the store sells color contact lenses and viral Korean snacks.
Gaeun Kwon, Olive Young’s U.S. CEO, said the company plans to switch over its shelves every two to three weeks—far more frequently than most U.S. retailers.
“We market ourselves as a trend-leading playground,” said Kwon, noting the company’s take on beauty retail is “a place where fun, newness and playfulness coexist.”
The privately held Olive Young first opened in South Korea in 1999. It has since expanded to over 1,400 stores. The store’s name is a pun on “all live young.” Annual sales surpassed $4.2 billion in 2025, the company said. More than half of its global digital sales come from the U.S., Kwon said.
TikTok has fueled a new wave of K-beauty fever, which first struck in the 2010s. Young shoppers enamored with the “glass skin” look are snapping up serums, peels, gels and mists. Sales of Korean beauty devices, from micro-current wands to red-light masks, are also booming.
Ulta Beauty and Sephora have stocked more Korean beauty brands recently, but the bulk of K-beauty sales are happening on Amazon and TikTok Shop, said Anna Mayo, an industry expert with NielsenIQ.
Sales of beauty products made in Korea hit $2.4 billion in the U.S. over the last year, a 48% year over year growth, according to data from NielsenIQ.
Last year, 173,000 Americans visited South Korea for medical treatments, according to Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare. The U.S. is now the biggest exporter of Korean beauty, outpacing China last year, according to data from the Korean government’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. On TikTok, seven of the 10 bestselling skin care brands are made in Korea, according to data firm Circana.
With K-beauty, American shoppers are trading down without sacrificing quality, Mayo said.
“In the environment we’re in, you have to watch your money,” said Ashley Mixon, a 46-year-old beauty influencer and K-beauty fan. “If you’re someone who wants to use a lot of products, you can absolutely do that with K-beauty.”
She counts herself among the masses making pilgrimages to Seoul for products and treatments. “On my last flight, I had to stop a flight attendant and ask for her skin care routine,” she said.
While K-beauty might be trendy, it’s still a small percentage of total American beauty sales. Korean products only made up 3% of sales for “prestige” high-end beauty in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from Circana, and only 6% of sales among mass beauty retailers. Olive Young enters a saturated market, where many Americans are used to shopping at Sephora, Ulta Beauty or their local drugstore.
Olive Young brought eight U.S. retail employees to its Seoul headquarters in March to train them in the feeling of Korean retail. Kwon described this as “efficient” and “immersive,” noting associates work at Olive Young to find shoppers the best products, and not necessarily push one brand over another. The company has plans to open more stores in the U.S., including in Los Angeles and New York.
Along with its new U.S. retail footprint, Olive Young is debuting an American e-commerce site, where products will ship from a California warehouse and not from Korea. Some Korean brands have been reformulating products like sunscreen to meet FDA regulations, a change that has Olive Young long-timers rushing to stock up on the original stuff.
“Korean sunscreens are light-years ahead, in my humble opinion,” said Mixon. “I’m buying two of everything.”
Write to Chavie Lieber at Chavie.Lieber@WSJ.com