"In the U.K., K-beauty has moved beyond a passing fad and become a fixture in the market," said Sarah Robb, a U.K. cosmetic safety assessor. "It used to be sold mainly through specialist online retailers, but now you can find it at major drugstore chains like Boots and Superdrug, and even at upscale department stores such as Selfridges."
Robb made the remarks in a recent interview with the Seoul Economic Daily in Seoul's Jongno District, adding that "Western brands now see K-beauty not as a mere trend but as an ideal standard they should aspire to."
In the U.K., cosmetics cannot be sold to the public without a safety assessment report prepared by a certified safety assessor. Robb has written safety assessment reports for leading K-beauty brands including Medicube and Anua since around 2020, and is regarded as one of the U.K.'s leading experts on K-beauty. Last year, she gave a presentation on K-beauty at SCS Formulate, the U.K.'s largest business-to-business cosmetics research and development conference and exhibition, hosted by the Society for Cosmetic Scientists. "At last year's event, mine was the only presentation dealing with K-beauty, but this year there were four," she said. "That shift shows K-beauty is increasingly becoming mainstream."
Robb stressed that K-beauty's popularity is reshaping not just product sales but the language and product development practices of the Western cosmetics industry. "When I first came across K-beauty's 'ampoule masks,' I couldn't understand how an ampoule, which means a small glass vial, could be a mask," she said. "But now Western brands are using the term ampoule for their cosmetics, just as K-beauty does." She added: "Western brands are not borrowing K-beauty's vocabulary simply for marketing purposes. Terms that originated in Korean beauty culture have spread to Western brands and come to signify quality, expertise and efficacy, so brands are actively making use of them."
A similar shift is under way in ingredients, she said. "When a particular ingredient is used in Korean cosmetics, that alone makes it a trending ingredient," Robb said, citing PDRN as a prime example. "Consumers show little aversion even to the fact that PDRN is derived from salmon testes," she added. "There is a sense that people accept it positively simply because it is an ingredient used in K-beauty products, and now Western brands are using these ingredients too."
She identified "innovative formulation" and product "efficacy" as K-beauty's competitive strengths. "Unlike the Western cosmetics industry, which tends to limit each ingredient to its established, predefined function, K-beauty formulators depart from that convention," she said. "Rather than confining ingredients to their previously defined functions, K-beauty formulators use them in new ways, and that unconstrained way of thinking has helped raise the efficacy and quality of products." She continued: "What characterizes K-beauty is that it presents evidence to back up the efficacy claims it makes. That is why consumers who try a product casually after seeing a claim such as pore reduction end up thinking, 'Wow, this is really good,' become repeat buyers and develop trust in K-beauty."
She named APR's Medicube as the K-beauty brand that left the strongest impression on her. "A few years ago I used Medicube's Zero Pore Pad myself and was so impressed that I immediately bought some for my daughter," Robb said. "When I first came across it I was skeptical about whether it would work, but after using it I was genuinely surprised that it actually did." She added: "A few years ago, if you asked people whether they knew the brand Medicube, perhaps one in 10 Britons would have said yes. Now almost everyone would say they know it. You can see Medicube products at large London shopping centers such as Westfield, at Boots stores, and even in Wales and Scotland."
APR's sales in the U.K. have indeed been climbing sharply. First-half revenue this year grew at a four-digit percentage rate from a year earlier. Its most popular product is the Zero Pore Pad, which has held the No. 1 spot in Amazon UK's toner category continuously from last December through the present. The product also ranked No. 1 across Amazon's entire beauty category in January this year and has remained between No. 1 and No. 6 since.