When Korean skin care arrived in the United States several years ago, it became the stuff of legend among beauty enthusiasts. They raved about the sunscreen from the Korean brand Beauty of Joseon, which used advanced UV filters and left no white film behind; currently, it costs $18\u2014its closest American counterpart would be about $40 and gloopier. Korean snail mucin promised to hydrate skin and improve fine lines, and prompted a buying frenzy, during which I did drop my own American dollars on a facial \u201cessence\u201d made from the secretions of snails. It has made my skin softer and only grossed me out twice.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Now my snail mucin is caught in a trade war. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump\u2019s announcement of nearly global tariffs included a 25 percent hike on goods imported to the U.S. from South Korea; his administration has also repealed a customs loophole used by certain K-beauty exporters based in Hong Kong. Some skin-care enthusiasts had been preparing for possible trade disruptions\u2014\u201cspent my paycheck on korean skincare because those tariffs are about to go crazy,\u201d one person posted<\/a> in December. But now, they\u2019re springing into action. \u201cIf you love your glow, get it now,\u201d one skin-care influencer said<\/a> on TikTok. \u201cThis is your last chance before it becomes unaffordable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Americans\u2019 love affair with K-beauty was fostered by many years of free trade with South Korea, when our mucin came free of additional fees. The new tariffs will be \u201ca good test to see how powerful the K brand is\u201d in America, Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies U.S.\u2013South Korea relations, told me\u2014how much \u201csoft power\u201d Korea has accumulated here. If people have been buying K-beauty products because they love K-beauty (or K-pop or K-dramas), a price hike might not matter. But if they decide Korean products haven\u2019t done that<\/em> much for their skin, maybe they\u2019ll switch to Neutrogena.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Beauty enthusiasts have, at times, gone to great lengths to import Korean serums, face masks, moisturizers, sunscreens, and the like from exporters usually based in Korea or Hong Kong. When Joshua Dupaya, a beauty influencer, first got into Korean products in 2016, for instance, he sourced them mostly from \u201ctrusted eBay sellers,\u201d he told me. Cosmetics have become a fairly significant part<\/a> of Korea\u2019s exports\u2014$10 billion globally last year, nearly $2 billion of which went to the United States. And certain K-beauty brands are more beloved here than in their home country. A co-founder of Beauty of Joseon said<\/a> on a podcast in December, \u201cWe\u2019re not really popular in Korea, I have to admit.\u201d (Their Korean brand name means \u201cbeautiful woman in Joseon,\u201d referring to the former, long-reigning Korean Joseon dynasty. She said Koreans think the name is \u201cso tacky.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Part of K-beauty\u2019s appeal is its price point\u2014$15 for a high-quality moisturizing cream compares favorably with a $20 bottle of CeraVe, and extremely<\/em> favorably with the $390 La Mer \u201ccr\u00e8me\u201d touted by the upper echelon of skin-care influencers and celebrities. Korean beauty products also contain ingredients that are uncommon in U.S. skin care, but that some American consumers swear by\u2014Centella asiatica <\/em>(Asiatic pennywort), rice water, ginseng extract, and of course, snail mucin. Their sunscreen is also just objectively better. The FDA is notoriously slow to approve new UV filters, which has meant that sunscreen in America is generally worse<\/a> than it is in Europe and Asia. Formulations here feel chalkier and oilier, and they can leave white residue behind, because American chemists have a smaller palette of UV technology to draw from. For $12, someone could buy American sunscreen in uninspiring packaging that makes them look like a ghost. For the same $12, they could buy a K-beauty sunscreen in expensive-looking packaging that will not make them look like a ghost. When my friend returned from South Korea with an entire carry-on full of Korean skin care, we applied gobs of sunscreen, feeling like royalty with our advanced UV protection. For skin-care aficionados, K-beauty was an ideal trifecta: a product that feels luxurious, seems effective, and <\/em>is relatively affordable.<\/p>\n

[Read: You\u2019re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n

The tariffs will test whether a higher price outweighs those other benefits. Yesterday, the founder of the Korean company KraveBeauty announced<\/a> on TikTok that the tariff will hit their next shipment to the U.S. and will have to be passed on to customers. \u201cWe\u2019re still calculating what the implications of this new trade policy would be to our business, but this will change pretty much everything,\u201d she said\u2014for her company and others. She said the tariffs could upend her brand\u2019s long-standing policy of keeping all their products under $28; those responding in the comments already spoke of K-beauty in the past tense; many included crying-face emoji.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s tariffs, of course, apply only to imported <\/em>K-beauty. In the past several years, a handful of major K-beauty manufacturers have opened factories in the United States and will be able to avoid the tariffs, Yeo told me. But he expects that other Korea-based companies will wait about a year to see if these tariffs last and how U.S. consumers respond to the price hike before they consider relocating to America. \u201cI don\u2019t know if Koreans want to invest that much,\u201d he said. \u201cIt depends how bullish you think the U.S. market is.\u201d American demand for K-beauty has grown a lot, but brands will have to decide if they think it\u2019ll keep growing. The U.S. isn\u2019t their only market, and companies may choose to focus on countries such as China instead.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But if the tariff succeeds and more K-beauty is soon made in America, the industry could lose its major selling point: it is not <\/em>made in America. These non-U.S. formulations are the \u201cwhole allure of using Korean beauty,\u201d Dupaya told me. Beauty of Joseon recently began<\/a> making versions of its beloved sunscreen specifically for the U.S. market, which meant it could use only UV technology approved by the FDA. Fairly or not, American users seem to think they have the same problems as U.S. sunblock. \u201cGarbage,\u201d a skin-care influencer said<\/a> about one of the American formulations. \u201cAbsolute garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Korean skin care arrived in the United States several years ago, it became the stuff of legend among beauty enthusiasts. They raved about the sunscreen from the Korean brand Beauty of Joseon, which used advanced UV filters and left no white film behind; currently, it costs $18\u2014its closest American counterpart would be about $40 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1499,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medical-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstamericanjournall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}