Snail Slime and Bee Venom Are K-Beauty’s Secrets to U.S. Success

In 2012, Alicia Yoon quit her job and hopped on a plane from New York to Seoul to scour South Korea for its most advanced skin-care products. She’d started to hear some buzz about lotions and potions coming from research labs in the country, soothing creams and pore-minimizing serums with ingredients, such as snail slime, not used by any mainstream brand. Yoon’s goal was to persuade the makers of some of the products to allow her to sell their wares in the U.S. It would take only a few weeks, she figured, so that summer she crashed at her parents’ house—Yoon was born and raised in South Korea—and spent her days knocking on laboratory door after laboratory door. “It was like a disaster, I had no income,” she says. “I thought, If in six months I’m not able to secure my first brand, the timing is probably not right.”

It ended up taking 5½ months for Yoon to get a single label, called Be the Skin, to sign on with her new business, Peach & Lily. Korean companies were initially wary of expanding beyond their own borders, especially with unknown sellers. So entrepreneurs like Yoon had to focus on cultivating relationships with owners. Her timing wasn’t so bad after all—awareness of K-beauty was just starting to sprout abroad as several other businesses, picking up on the interest, came to life.