Olive Young, Korea's biggest beauty retailer, runs two stores. The Korean one (oliveyoung.co.kr) is in Korean, priced in won, and shows what people in Korea buy. The Global one (global.oliveyoung.com) is in English, priced in dollars, and ships abroad. Each has its own best-seller chart.
Most "what's trending in K-beauty" lists quote one of them and call it Korea. I wanted to know how different the two really are, so on October 2 I pulled the top 100 of both and matched them product by product.
How I matched them
Product names are useless for this. The same item is [4년 연속 1위] 어노브 딥 데미지 리페어 헤어 마스크… on one site and UNOVE Deep Damage Repair Hair Mask 320mL Double Pack (6 Options) on the other.
Barcodes work. Both stores expose the EAN of each product (the Global store per option, too), so the join is one line:
kr = {p["barcode"]: p for p in korea_top100}
for g in global_top100:
codes = {g["barcode"]} | {o["barcode"] for o in g["options"]}
match = next((kr[c] for c in codes if c in kr), None)
32 of 100 are the same product
Thirty-two products are on both charts with the same barcode. The #1 is identical: the Mediheal Essential sheet mask 10+1 set.
The top of the Global chart is very Korean: 7 of its top 10 are also in Korea's top 100. Further down the two lists drift apart. By brand, the Global chart has 62 brands and the Korean one 68, and 31 are on both.
So roughly a third overlap by product, half by brand. The other half is where it gets interesting.
What Korea buys that the Global chart doesn't show
Twelve of Korea's top 100 come from eight brands that aren't Korean at all: La Roche-Posay (three products, including #2 overall, Cicaplast Baume B5+), Bioderma, The Ordinary, Uriage, Paula's Choice, Dove, Johnson's, Senka.
Korean shoppers use Olive Young the way Americans use a drugstore, French pharmacy brands included. On the Global chart there are two non-Korean brands in total, and one of them is Listerine.
What the world buys that Korea's chart doesn't show
The brands that are famous outside Korea are mostly missing from Korea's weekly top 100: Beauty of Joseon, SKIN1004, medicube, Purito Seoul, manyo, Rejuran and Centellian24 are all on the Global chart and none of them is on the Korean one.
The category mix differs as well:
| Global top 100 | Korea top 100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Skincare, masks, cleansers, sun | 44 | 49 |
| Makeup | 26 | 30 |
| Sunscreen only | 6 | 3 |
| Supplements | 5 | 0 |
| Food & drink | 4 | 2 |
Global #2 overall is a diet jelly. Probiotic sticks appear three times. International shoppers treat the store as a Korean pharmacy, not only a skincare shop.
Character editions sell better abroad than at home
Fourteen of the Global top 100 are Sanrio editions (Korea: 8). Another eight are Anpanman editions, including a toothpaste, a mouthwash and a popcorn bucket. About a quarter of the international chart is a regular product in a cartoon box.
The same barcode costs 1.6x more on the Global store
For the 32 matched products I compared the listed sale price on each store, converting won at 1,360 per dollar (the rate that day).
- Median: the Global price is 1.59x the Korean price.
- 22 of 32 are more than 1.5x.
- Range: 0.96x (Dr. Althea 345 Relief Cream set, $20.52 vs ₩29,000) to 2.27x (Anua PDRN capsule serum, Sanrio edition, $46.55 vs ₩27,900).
- The #1 sheet mask set: $13.50 abroad, ₩9,900 (about $7.28) in Korea.
Both stores were running sales when I looked: 90 of the Global top 100 and 82 of the Korean top 100 were discounted, by a median of 26% and 29%.
Review counts live in different universes
Korea's top 100 carries 5.15 million reviews in total, with a median of about 21,000 per product. The Global top 100: 105,902 in total, median 387. Fourteen Global best-sellers have no rating yet and 25 have fewer than 50 reviews.
If you rank products by review count, on the Global store you're ranking by how long the listing has existed.
A few more things in the Global data
- Stock is visible. The Global store reports units in stock: median 273 across the top 100, eight products under 50, and one set at #18 down to 3 units.
- Ingredients come in English. 85 of the 100 have an ingredient list (median 46 ingredients). Ceramide NP is in 36%, Niacinamide in 35%, Adenosine in 35%, Sodium DNA (PDRN) in 16%. Fragrance: 28%.
- Two thirds are sets on both charts: double packs, refill bundles, "+ mini" gift sets. Single units are the exception.
- Not everything is made in Korea. Six of the Global top 100 list another country of manufacture: four accessories from China, Listerine from Thailand, one highlighter from the USA.
Reproducing it
The Global chart comes from my new Olive Young Global Scraper:
{ "mode": "bestsellers", "includeDetails": true, "maxItems": 100 }
The Korean chart comes from the Olive Young Scraper:
{ "mode": "ranking", "rankingCategories": ["all"], "rankingPeriod": "WEEK", "rankingTop": 100 }
Both return a barcode field, and the Global one returns options[].barcode as well. The charts themselves come back in seconds; adding details takes a few minutes because it fetches three extra pages per product. Schedule both daily and you get a rank, price and stock history for each market.
Caveats
- One day, one snapshot. The Korean chart is the weekly one; the Global store doesn't say what period its "Top Orders" chart covers.
- 32 is a lower bound. A product sold as a single in one store and as a double pack in the other has two different barcodes and doesn't match.
- Korean prices include 10% VAT, and neither side includes shipping. The price gap is between list prices, not what lands on your card.
- For products with options I compared the matching option's price where the barcode matched an option, and the listing price otherwise.
If you track K-beauty for a living, look at both charts. They agree on the #1 and on not much else.
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