Before K-beauty became a growth engine for US beauty retail, aesthetician and consultant Alicia Yoon was trying to convince buyers that it was a category at all.
When Yoon founded Peach & Lily in 2012, she estimated American awareness of Korean beauty was “close to zero.” She conducted an informal focus group of approximately 100 people, only a handful of whom l had heard of Korean skincare. Sheet masks and BB creams sparked slightly more recognition, but few consumers connected them to a broader Korean beauty ecosystem.
Yoon saw this disconnect as an opportunity. Growing up between Korea and the US while managing severe eczema, she regularly brought Korean skincare back to the US. Friends encountered products and formats that were largely absent from American shelves: essences, snail creams, masks, new textures, and unfamiliar ingredients.
“I could not believe that in 2012, living in a globalized world, and yet these huge categories and ingredients were not accessible in the US,” Yoon told BeautyMatter.
Peach & Lily began by trying to change that—not with a hero SKU, but with distribution. The company launched as an e-commerce retailer and secured US distribution rights for Korean brands such as Be the Skin, pitching them to Sephora, Urban Outfitters, QVC, Macy’s, Bergdorf Goodman, CVS, Target, and others. Yoon explained that, in many cases, it was the first time those retailers had considered carrying a Korean beauty product.
Getting the meetings was one thing. Getting buyers to believe US consumers would care was another. “It took a lot of education,” Yoon said. Peach & Lily used its own sales data to demonstrate that demand existed beyond Korean American consumers. At the same time, Yoon spent years “pounding the pavement” with retailers and media explaining why the category mattered.
Then the numbers began doing the selling. As Korean products performed, buyer confidence spread. Retail executives switched companies with proof that K-beauty could convert; retailers that once needed convincing began asking how they could participate.
That is the most consequential part of Yoon’s founder story. Peach & Lily did not simply catch the K-beauty wave. It helped build the commercial case for one. Yoon spent six years in R&D, helping move Korean beauty from niche discovery to mainstream retail, and in 2018 Peach & Lily launched its own products.
That success created a new challenge: Once K-beauty was everywhere, being K-beauty was no longer enough.
When she launched her brand, Yoon had helped solve K-beauty’s awareness problem. In doing so, she created another for Peach & Lily: the brand needed its own point of view. It found one in “glass skin.” Originating from Korea’s “see-through skin” phenomenon, Yoon noticed the lack of awareness of the look in the West, and popularized it with a new phrasing.
Peach & Lily’s first product, the Glass Skin Refining Serum, launched around a phrase that was still unfamiliar enough to make Yoon nervous. “I actually thought people might think, ‘Does my skin turn fragile, like glass?’” she recalled.
Consumers got it. The serum went viral, helping propel Peach & Lily to $100 million in sales within its first five years. It also generated so many questions that Yoon eventually wrote an ebook explaining what glass skin actually meant. What followed is instructive for how Peach & Lily has built its brand. Rather than simply importing another Korean trend, Yoon packaged a skincare philosophy into language that American consumers could understand and want.
“Glass skin is all about your skin at its healthiest,” she said, which is a less superficial proposition than the poreless, reflective complexions that later flooded social media. Yoon’s version starts with skin function. Someone with eczema, someone in their 40s, and someone with entirely different skin concerns should not have identical versions of “glass skin.” The common denominator is getting each person’s skin to its healthiest baseline.
That philosophy also positioned Peach & Lily neatly for beauty’s pivot from more-is-more routines to barrier-first skincare. While K-beauty became synonymous in the US with the 10-step routine, Yoon said Peach & Lily never subscribed to steps for steps’ sake.
“Skin is an ecosystem,” she said. Treating hyperpigmentation with vitamin C or reaching straight for an aggressive active can miss the bigger problem if the skin underneath is dehydrated, compromised, or inflamed.
Peach & Lily’s hierarchy is simpler: Establish cleansing, nourishment, hydration, and protection first, then treat. The consumer has moved too. Through “Ask Lily,” the brand’s in-house aesthetician consultation service, Yoon has watched questions evolve in real time. In the mid-2010s, customers wanted to know how to construct a 10-step routine. Now, they are more likely to ask how to layer products for maximum efficacy.
That shift raises the stakes for K-beauty. Novelty may have opened the door, but an essence being unfamiliar is no longer enough to earn shelf space or loyalty. The next battle is performance. Yoon thinks Korea has an advantage that sits much further upstream than the latest viral ingredient.
K-beauty won its first US battle on novelty. Yoon thinks its next will be won much further upstream, in the lab. Her bet is on biotech.
Through Peach & Lily’s work in Korea, Yoon said the team tracks innovation at the level of ingredient suppliers before new technologies even reach manufacturers or finished formulas. What she is seeing now is an acceleration in biotech-led skincare, particularly around fermentation, stability, delivery, and absorption.
“Korea is leading the global mecca in terms of where performance can go in skincare,” she said. For years, K-beauty’s export story was built around what felt new to Western consumers: snail mucin, cushion compacts, essences, sheet masks. Yoon argues the next layer of differentiation is less about discovering a new ingredient and more about engineering existing ones to work harder.
Biotech makes that possible. Instead of simply extracting a botanical and dropping it into a formula, suppliers can use enzymatic processes and fermentation techniques to alter how ingredients behave, improving consistency, stability, and the efficacy with which they are delivered into the skin. Korea’s long history with fermentation, Yoon argued, gives the market a particular advantage here.
Peach & Lily is applying that thinking to a problem Yoon knows personally: potency versus irritation. Her severe eczema meant that, as she began reaching for stronger active treatments in her 30s, the promised results often came with flare-ups. That experience became the basis for what the brand calls “Actives for All”—concentrated skincare designed without treating irritation as an unavoidable cost of efficacy.
The company’s Actives for All treatments undergo clinical instrumentation testing to assess barrier disruption, and the products carry the National Eczema Association Seal of Acceptance. Yoon also says formulas are stress-tested on compromised skin.
It is a useful example of how Peach & Lily sees K-beauty’s competitive advantage evolving. As Western brands adopt barrier language, Korean-inspired formats, and ingredients once considered niche, surface-level distinctions are becoming harder to defend.
The barrier, Yoon believes, is increasingly in the science behind the formula. For all K-beauty's ubiquity in the US, Yoon argues that America is still seeing only a narrow slice of Korea's beauty ecosystem, with thousands of brands, ingredients, and formulation philosophies yet to make the journey.
Peach & Lily’s next mission is to familiarize the Western consumer with zombie cells. The brand’s new Advanced Rebound Bioglow Zombie Cream is built around cellular senescence (aka zombie cells). Yoon explains this as a process where instead of functioning like normal cells, dying and clearing away, some cells remain in tissue and release inflammatory signals that can damage surrounding healthy cells.
“They just sit there,” she said. “They wreak havoc.” Yoon described the process as a “domino effect of damage,” with dysfunctional cells potentially contributing to further dysfunction in their vicinity. The science itself is not new—she pointed to decades of research into senescence—but consumer awareness remains low.
That gap is exactly what interests her. “Why isn’t this the biggest conversation in skincare?” Yoon remembers thinking when Peach & Lily began digging into the research.
The commercial challenge is obvious. Cellular senescence is not an easy sell, and “zombie cells” could quickly veer into gimmick territory. Peach & Lily is leaning into the shock value anyway. Internally, Yoon says the reaction was consistently the same: “Wait, zombie cells are real?”
For the brand, that disbelief became the marketing hook. The phrase earns attention; the education has to justify it. “It’s not in this gimmicky way,” Yoon said. “It’s a way to really lean into that sentiment and then draw you into that education.”
It is also a neat encapsulation of Yoon’s broader playbook. Fourteen years ago, she was explaining essences, snail creams, and Korean skincare to buyers who were not convinced Americans would care. Today, she is trying to translate a far more complex piece of skin science into something a shopper can understand in seconds.
The subject has changed. The strategy has not. For Peach & Lily, education has always been the bridge between unfamiliarity and demand. If Yoon is right about where K-beauty is heading next, the category’s next breakthroughs may not be the products consumers instantly recognize. They may be the ones brands have to teach them to want.