Best K-Beauty Apps And Websites
You know you can get some of the best Korean beauty products at STYLE STORY (ahem, the 2024 Best of Beauty Award winning Lip Glaze and 2023 winning Sleeping Mask). But what if you want to know which K-Beauty products everyone in Korea is obsessed with?
Get our list of the K-Beauty apps and websites in Korea that will keep you up to date with the latest Korean skincare, makeup and beauty trends with user generated content.
Keeping up with the latest products and trends isn’t always easy, with so many new products being released each week and each looking more insta-worthy than the last.
Making it even harder, many bloggers and YouTubers these days are paid by companies to say that they love a certain product, which makes it really hard to get an accurate reading on what's actually good vs what products people are being paid to say are good.
Now while the following apps aren't exactly 100% free from bias either they are a good litmus test for what's trending in Korea.
These are some of the most popular sites in Korea to find user generated reviews and rankings of K-Beauty products:
Launched in 2013, HwaHae is a Korean beauty app that boasts hundreds of thousands of cosmetics reviews and ingredient analyses. It’s an independent third party source of information on cosmetics that enables beauty lovers to find their perfect match.
The name “Hwahae” (화해) is short for “화장품을 해석하다”, which literally means “to analyse cosmetics”. Millions of Koreans use Hwahae to search for information on beauty products’ ingredients and see how safe they are for the skin.
Hwahae has become a must-visit destination for beauty lovers with sensitive skin, eczema and hair loss. The app produces weekly rankings for products and features the hottest trending products by users for each category. The app promotes smart buying, not only in terms of budget and cost, but also by enabling users to tailor their skincare routines to take into account their own skin types.
It uses a scale to help users choose the best products for them based on:
Blue (rating 1-3): products needing the least concern / caution, namely those that contain the most common ingredients that are generally okay to use on all skin types;
Yellow (rating 4-7): products needing mild or medium concern / caution, with ingredients that may be harmful to certain skin types or in high concentrations;
Red (rating 8 and above): products needing high or heavy concern / caution, with high concentrations of ingredients that should be avoided because of their potential to harm skin.
Now, take these ratings with a huge grain of salt because they aren't particularly scientific or evidence based. Unfortunately, they buy into a lot of clean beauty fallacies that have more to do with categorizing ingredients and fear mongering rather than looking at the formulation of a skin care product as a whole. Case in point retinol, which receives a "red grade" rating, but is actually an excellent ingredient that has the ability to transform your skin.
The app focuses mostly on Korean skincare and cosmetic, meaning Korean manufacturers also keep a close eye on it. Not only do they use positive reviews to promote their products, manufacturers also use negative reviews as a learning experience.
As a result of negative reviews on Hwahae, AmorePacificand LG Household and Health Care (two of the biggest names in K-Beauty globally) made an effort to downgrade the irritancy level of their products, particularly with the use of fragrances.
Korean consumers are particularly attuned to newer brands, and are conscious that brand value is no guarantee of quality. As a result, many new brands have managed to make a brand for themselves for releasing quality products that skip out on the harmful ingredients.
Now, the app is definitely not 100% free from bias. There are allegations that brands pay people to review products there as well and brands can also pay the app company for promoted rankings.
However, there's no doubt that Hwahae does generally mention a lot of the products that are trending in Korea in real time and introduces plenty of indie beauty brands too.
Boasting over half a million users and tens of millions of website hits each day, Glow Pickis another site (with a linked app) where you can check beauty rankings, read user reviews and even write your own reviews.
The site allows you to search popular products by brand as well as categories, with a large range of categories including masks, skincare, makeup, skin concerns, hair, nails, fragrances, female products, salon products and many more.
Glowpick’s ranking process is somewhat different to other platforms as it runs an algorithm to establish which reviews are credible and genuine.
They release the "Best of Beauty" award winners twice a year. Check out Lauren's round up of the winners over on the Korean Beauty Show podcast.
What are the best K-Beauty apps and websites you’ve found? Let us know in the comments
"Want to know what's actually popular in K-Beauty in Korea? Check out Hwahae, Bling Dear, Glow Pick and Meme Box"
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