A Visit I Had Been Looking Forward To

As someone working with the Amorepacific India team, I have always been fascinated by the company's history, heritage and innovation, which is why I couldn’t wait for this visit. Watching young students, who were just starting out in the beauty industry, step inside the company they had followed for years was rewarding in a way I hadn’t expected. Before I dive into the experience, I’d like to thank Youngkyu Oh and Yeondong You for welcoming us so warmly.

A Moon Jar in Yongsan

After lunch together, we headed towards the Amorepacific headquarters. As we approached the building, I immediately understood why it has become an architectural landmark in Seoul. I’d seen pictures, but seeing it in person was a whole different story. Designed by British architect David Chipperfield, the building takes its form from the Korean moon jar—a single luminous cube with its center carved open. It sits proudly between the city skyline and the green of Namsan.

A Matcha Break on the Way In

No visit is complete without making a stop at OSULLOC on the first floor. I had heard people rave about the matcha, but now I understood why—it was easily one of the smoothest matcha drinks I've had in Korea, rich, earthy and refreshing. It was the perfect break during the tour. I also visited the INNISFREE Café on the second floor, another hidden gem upstairs. Inspired by the natural ingredients of Jeju Island, the café reflects the INNISFREE brand’s philosophy through its menu, its interiors and its relaxed pace.

Welcome to K-Beauty Dreamland

Although I enjoyed every moment, the part that stayed with me most was watching the ETUDE x Pearl Academy graduates. Many of them had admired Korean Beauty from a distance, and now they were standing inside the company that has led the global K-beauty industry.

For context, the ETUDE x Pearl Academy is a program by Amorepacific India in collaboration with Pearl Academy, one of India's leading institutions for creative education in design, fashion, media, business and communication. The program was created to give young beauty and digital content creators a chance to build practical skills and understand the beauty industry beyond what they see on social media. Through sessions on beauty, content creation, social media and personal branding, it brings education and real-world exposure together. Taking that learning out of the classroom and into the headquarters felt like a natural next step.

Inside AMORE YONGSAN

Still inside the same building, the tour continued at AMORE YONGSAN. It began with an introduction to Amorepacific's portfolio of brands, each carrying its own identity, philosophy and heritage. From there, we moved through a series of experiences built around how cutting-edge technology actually enters a product—the Beauty Lab, the Fragrance Lab, and a station where a device reads the skin tone and mixes a matching foundation.

Looking at K-Beauty Through an India Lens

The experience of creating my custom foundation stayed with me because it made personalization tangible. Instead of beauty being about finding a one-size-fits-all answer, technology was being used to read one person’s needs and build outward from there. For most of the graduates, it was the first time seeing their own skin tone read by a machine. The Fragrance Lab offered the same lesson in a completely different category, showing how something as subjective as scent can be approached through profiling and personal preference.

This is where India kept coming to mind. We have an enormously diverse consumer base, with differences in skin tones, skin types, climates and beauty routines across the country. A cream that feels right in a Delhi winter can feel heavy in Mumbai's humidity. What works for one consumer may not work for another a few hundred kilometers away, which makes the move towards more personalized beauty especially relevant from an Indian perspective.

Indian consumers are also becoming more conscious about what they put on their skin. Today, a consumer often discovers a product online, looks up its ingredients, checks what each one does, and only then decides whether it deserves a place in their routine. Seeing how much research goes into a single formula at Amorepacific made something crystal clear for me: we need to communicate not just what a product does, but why it works.

From Seoul to a Morning in Mumbai

Personalization, ingredient transparency, hands-on experience—all of it points back to the same thing. Bringing K-beauty to India isn't about moving the same products or trends into another market. It is about understanding the Indian consumer and finding the right point of connection. A skincare innovation that works beautifully in Korea may need a different approach for Indian climates, routines and preferences. The opportunity lies in taking the innovation and the thinking behind K-beauty and making it meaningful for the Indian consumers.

That is why the question I kept asking in Seoul was not whether a product could one day reach India, but what need it would address once it arrived. Most consumers meet a product at the end of its journey, on a shelf. I had just seen the beginning of it. There was something exciting about walking that road backwards—encountering an idea in Seoul and imagining the morning, years from now, when someone in Mumbai reaches for the finished product without a second thought.