From PDRN to snail mucin, rice extract to cica, Korean beauty (or K-beauty) ingredients and innovations have taken over the beauty industry in recent years.
Ash Potter runs the Kbeauty Krew TikTok page and joined Doireann Garrihy on RTÉ 2FM to talk all about Korean beauty products. Listen back above.
Calling herself an “enthusiast” rather than an “expert”, Potter was first introduced to K-beauty during a year living abroad in Japan, ten years ago.
“I was bombarded when I got off the plane by all these skincare shops”, she recalls, adding that “especially at that time it was really, really cheap in Korea to buy Korean skincare”.
Potter continued to visit South Korea, hooked on the skincare and beauty offerings, before eventually moving to the country for three years: “My love just blossomed and blossomed and blossomed.”
She feels sure that K-beauty has taken over the high street when it comes to cosmetics: “Every shop I go into, every pharmacy, everywhere I look online in regards to skin is K-beauty. I think it’s because it actually works.”
She recalls her first experiments with K-beauty products, saying that “within two weeks I actually saw a difference in my skin and a glow in my skin”.
“It’s because they care about the ingredients, and they have to care about the ingredients because in South Korea it’s so competitive. The amount of skincare shops they have in South Korea is like the amount of pubs that we have.”
Due to this “fierce competition”, she adds, the K-beauty brands “have to be cost-effective too”, which only makes them more attractive to global shoppers, too. “It goes a long way for what the cost is.”
There’s another element to its appeal, however, and that is the sheer fantasy some of these K-beauty brands create in their marketing:
“At the moment, where we’re seeing in Western cosmetics or Western beauty, this trend of the ‘clean girl look’ where everything is muted, and everything’s a little grey and understated.
“Korean skincare comes in, and it goes, ‘no’. We’re going to be pink, we’re going to have cute characters on it, we’re going to have really interesting and unique packaging that, I think, we haven’t really seen before, and I think a lot of people are missing the whimsy of life.”
She explains that this is why we are now seeing “Western brands” starting to mimic Korean skincare and beauty products, at a rapid pace.
“It used to be that something would be popular in Korea and then maybe two years, three years later you’d see it in Ireland”, she says, pointing to the gradual arrival of sheet masks in the Irish market a number of years ago.
“I feel bad for the Western companies actually; they’re feeling the pinch.”
With such innovation, the ‘it’ K-beauty ingredient can change in a matter of weeks. This summer was dominated by PDRN, the “polite” term for which is ‘salmon DNA’, Potter explains, but which is actually salmon sperm. Its main properties in skincare are hydration and a plumping effect, and we’ve seen it appear in everything from serums and eye creams to cleansers.
The next K-beauty ingredient to take over, however, could be teca, Potter says. She explains that this is the scientific term for centella asianica extract, which is “really good for anti-acne”.