[Beautynury] 2026 K-Beauty Reshapes the Market Through Efficacy, User Experience, and AI Execution

This article is originally posted by 김민혜 기자 (Kim Min-Hye) on Beautynury's November 28, 2025 Article. To read the full feature, please visit the link below:

The pace of K-beauty’s expansion in the global beauty market is visibly accelerating. Consumers are increasingly selecting products based on the scientific validation of ingredients, clinical evidence, satisfaction during use, and experiences that encourage repeat purchases. As a result, the market is shifting toward a model that combines functional credibility with sensory enjoyment.

These changes are also directly influencing how brands make data-driven decisions and restructure their product development, planning, and distribution strategies. In response, Trendier AI hosted the “K-Beauty Trend Summit 2025” online from the 6th to the 21st, presenting key factors reshaping the global beauty market—including the 2026 K-beauty outlook, ingredient and formulation innovation, and AI-powered execution cases.

K-Beauty in 2026: A Focus on Medical Science, Devices, and Experience

During the session titled “2026 K-Beauty Outlook,” Lucie Shin, Head of Data Business at Trendier AI, noted that the presence of Korean brands is rapidly increasing across global platforms. In the first half of 2025, K-beauty brands such as Medicube, Laneige, and Anua ranked among the top performers in the U.S. Amazon skincare category. On Qoo10 Japan, 19 of the top 20 skincare products were Korean brands, while on Shopee Singapore, 14 of the top 20 brands originated from Korea.

“Cases where Korean brands dominate top rankings across platforms are becoming increasingly common,” Shin explained. “This reflects the rapidly growing presence of K-beauty in the global market.”

Kelly Kovack, Founder and CEO of BeautyMatter and moderator of the session, attributed the competitiveness of Korean brands to their combination of ingredient- and clinically driven credibility with experience-centered value. “Sensory elements such as spreadability, absorption, and the feeling left on the skin play a decisive role in reviews and social media sharing,” she said, adding that these experiences drive repeat purchases and reinforce brand trust. Trendier AI data also shows that texture-related expressions consistently appear as key keywords across U.S., Japanese, and Korean platforms.

Shin went on to outline the seven K-beauty trends expected to lead 2026. The first is the mass adoption of medical-grade active ingredients. “Global consumers are seeking verified actives, and K-beauty is the fastest at commercializing them,” she said. According to Olive Young and Naver data collected by Trendier AI, products based on medical and pharmaceutical ingredients such as PDRN, exosomes, and dexpanthenol recorded year-on-year growth of 100–300%.

The second trend is the integration of skincare devices into daily routines. Devices once considered occasional or clinic-level tools are now becoming part of everyday skincare. Medicube’s AGE-R Booster Pro, for example, saw a sharp increase in Google Trends search volume, ranking second in the wrinkle and anti-aging category on Amazon US and first among skincare devices on Olive Young Global.

The third key trend is sensory texture. “Consumers are no longer satisfied with functionality alone,” Shin explained. “The tactile feel at application, the absorption process, and the changes experienced on the skin have become central factors in purchase decisions.”

Other major growth drivers for K-beauty in 2026 include cooling care in response to global warming, collectible packaging that stimulates a sense of ownership, ‘skincare glow’ makeup and sunscreens, and ‘K-Glass Haircare,’ which extends the iconic glass skin concept into haircare.

“Looking at all seven trends together, the next stage of K-beauty can be summarized as:

△ scientific evolution through dermatological and medical-grade actives and devices,

△ experiential evolution through sensory engagement and collectible packaging, and

△ category expansion into makeup and haircare,” Shin stated.

She emphasized that “K-Beauty in 2026 can ultimately be defined by three keywords: innovation, experience, and expansion.”

AI Enables a Repeatable Growth Model

In the session titled “How K-Beauty Creates Repeatable Bestsellers Through AI,” Kei Chun, Co-Founder and CEO of Trendier AI, explained the structural reasons behind K-beauty’s ability to consistently produce hit products in global markets.

Chun identified speed, data, and AI as the core growth engines of the Korean beauty industry. Korea’s fast-paced consumer and distribution environment has compressed development and feedback cycles, while the massive volume of reviews, searches, and sales signals generated through this process has become the foundation of brand decision-making.

“The speed at which consumers leave feedback itself creates pressure that shortens R&D and planning cycles,” Chun said, noting that rapid feedback loops are key to building repeatable hit structures.

The second pillar lies in how market data is interpreted. By connecting supply-side data—such as ingredients, efficacy, pricing, and promotions—with demand-side data including sales volume, reviews, and rankings, Chun explained that brands can “map the direction the market is heading.” He added that traditional manual update methods made it difficult to systematically identify which ingredient combinations drive growth or which pricing and positioning strategies translate into actual sales.

“AI-based data analysis reduces resource consumption through the automation of repetitive tasks, while also lowering judgment errors at the planning stage,” he emphasized.

Dhilla Isthiari, Head of Data Business (Global) at Trendier AI, then presented step-by-step examples of how AI solves real-world operational challenges. At the R&D stage, she noted that while scientists can complete formulations, predicting which combinations will drive sales or how consumer evaluations will shift remains difficult through intuition alone.

Using AI, brands can instantly retrieve leading products within a specific efficacy category and simultaneously analyze ingredient combinations, efficacy claims, and positive and negative reviews—deriving optimal combinations within seconds. “Market research and formula validation that once took weeks or months have now been reduced to a daily timeline,” Isthiari said. “This allows teams to focus on formulas with a higher probability of success instead of spending time on unverified combinations.”

In product planning, AI helps reduce uncertainty around market selection and category entry. Isthiari pointed out that many decisions were previously made based on fragmented reports, intuition, or limited data—an approach that struggles to keep pace in a beauty market where trends shift weekly.

In marketing, AI addresses challenges such as limited comparison and testing resources. “Marketers used to manually collect and compare hundreds of competitors’ product pages—analyzing thumbnails, copy, pricing and bundling strategies, and review responses,” she explained. “With AI, a single prompt can extract shared strategies among top-performing brands and automatically generate creative briefs, including headline examples, review-based keywords, and visual direction.”

This shift significantly reduces guesswork and enables testing based on validated patterns.