Hi there! Your beauty guide here.
If you live in South Korea, there’s a place you end up walking into at least once a week — or really, every time you happen to pass by, the way a sparrow can’t resist a mill. That place is Olive Young! By now Olive Young has become far more than just a cosmetics store — it’s the epicenter of Korean trends and the “Mecca of K-Beauty” that foreign tourists consider a must-visit whenever they come to Korea.
Today, let’s dig into why we’re so obsessed with Olive Young, along with can’t-miss picks by category and the latest news, all in one place!
1. The Secret Behind Olive Young Becoming “The Nation’s Drugstore”
When Olive Young first opened, it was just an ordinary store modeled after drugstores abroad — but now it holds a position all its own. What’s the secret?
- Speed at catching trends: Olive Young is the fastest to spot small and mid-sized indie brands that start buzzing on Instagram, YouTube, or beauty apps, and gets them onto its shelves. Walk into Olive Young and you can tell at a glance what’s trending right now.
- Offline accessibility + fast delivery: Not only are stores everywhere — near your home, your office, subway stations — but online, the same-day delivery service “Oneul Dream” (“Today’s Dream”) has quickly taken off and is driving growth. In fact, Oneul Dream delivery volume grew more than threefold, from about 5.98 million orders in 2022 to about 19.2 million in 2025, and thanks to this online growth, Olive Young’s share of the domestic beauty market topped 20% for the first time.
- The addictiveness of Olive Young Sale: During the massive “Olive Young Sale” that comes around several times a year, you can snag products you’ve had your eye on at jaw-dropping discounts or exclusive bundle sets — it’s impossible to keep your wallet closed.
2. Don’t Miss Out! Must-Buy Picks by Category
Standing in front of thousands of products at Olive Young, it’s hard to know what to buy, right? Here are the failproof, category-by-category steady sellers.
Skincare (Basics)
- Round Lab Dokdo Toner / Anua Heartleaf Toner: A universally loved pick for calming skin and “dak-to” (wipe-off toner) use — no complaints from anyone. Highly recommended if you have sensitive skin.
- Mediheal / Torriden Sheet Masks: A must-have for the “one mask a day” crowd! Nothing beats these for affordable hydration and soothing. Stocking up in bundles during a sale is basically a national pastime.
Makeup (Color Cosmetics)
- Clio / rom&d: Famous for lip tints and eyeshadow palettes fine-tuned to Korean skin tones. rom&d’s Juicy Lasting Tint in particular has gone globally viral for its glossy, tanghulu-like shine.
- WAKEMAKE: Olive Young’s own private-label brand, offering a professional-grade range of colors at reasonable prices.
The Unexpected Dark Horse: “Food & Inner Beauty”
Olive Young is also a snack haven! Olive Young’s own healthy-snack brand “Delight Project” relaunched with a rebrand in January 2021, and its signature products — bagel chips and honey yakgwa — went viral on social media as “must-buy items for K-tourism,” surpassing 30 million cumulative bags sold within three years. They’re a magic item you end up grabbing a bag of every single visit, thanks to the satisfying crunch and low calorie guilt. They’re especially explosive among foreign tourists — over the past three years, Delight Project’s foreign-customer sales have grown by an average of 30x per year, and despite being a snack category, it has even landed in the top 10 most popular brands by foreign-customer sales. This past April, Delight Project even opened its first standalone store in Haeundae, Busan.
3. Olive Young Reaches Out to the World
Olive Young is no longer just for Koreans. Walk into the Myeongdong or Hongdae stores and you’ll see the surreal sight of more foreign tourists than Korean shoppers.
Olive Young’s popularity is heating up overseas, too. Its own cross-border e-commerce platform, “Olive Young Global Mall,” launched in 2019 and has been rapidly scaling up — as of the first half of 2025, it recorded 3.35 million cumulative members, with revenue up 70% year-over-year. The U.S. still accounts for the largest share of revenue, but markets like the U.K., Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore are also posting triple-digit growth rates, rapidly expanding its global footprint.
Beyond online, offline expansion is also picking up speed. This year, Olive Young launched a “K-Beauty Edit” curated shelf at major Sephora stores in the U.S., and plans to expand into Sephora stores in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong by the end of the year, followed by Canada, Australia, the U.K., and the Middle East by 2027. Olive Young has already opened standalone stores in California. By building a system that lets people anywhere in the world easily encounter K-beauty trends, Olive Young keeps raising the profile of K-beauty, one step at a time.