Who in Korea Actually Searches Which K-Beauty Brand — by Age and Gender (2026 Data)
K-beauty is sold abroad as one audience: young women chasing glass skin. Korean search data says otherwise. We broke 14 brands down by age band and gender, and the brand English-language shops sell as a gentle women's toner turns out to index more than twice as high among Korean men.
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Who in Korea Actually Searches Which K-Beauty Brand — by Age and Gender (2026 Data)
Read K-beauty content in English and you'd conclude Korea has exactly one skincare consumer: a woman in her twenties, chasing glass skin, buying whatever went viral last month.
We ran the numbers on that. Naver lets you split search demand by age band and gender, so we pulled 14 K-beauty brands across five demographic slices of Korea — women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, men in their 20s and 30s — for the twelve months to June 2026.
Korea isn't one audience. It isn't close. And several brands are searched by almost the opposite group to the one they're sold to abroad.
How We Measured This
HOW WE EVALUATE
This is Naver DataLab's search trend index, pulled through Naver's open API, for the 13 complete months ending June 2026, requested separately for each demographic slice.
The one thing you must understand to read the tables below. DataLab reports relative interest, and it re-scales within each request. So every number here is anchored to COSRX = 1.00 inside that same demographic. When we say Round Lab scores 1.05 among men and 0.47 among women, that means: relative to COSRX, Round Lab stands more than twice as tall among men as it does among women. It does not mean Korean men run more Round Lab searches than Korean women do — we can't see raw volumes, and COSRX has its own skew. Every comparison on this page is a comparison of relative standing within a group, never of raw traffic between groups.
What else this can't tell you: search is attention, not purchase. Women's figures average three age bands (20s/30s/40s); men's average two (20s/30s), because Naver's male 40s data for these brands is too thin to read. Small brands sitting near 0.1 are close to the noise floor — treat Some By Mi's numbers as "very low", not as precise. And we again excluded Medicube, whose Korean search volume is dominated by its beauty-device line rather than skincare.
The Gender Split
Relative standing versus COSRX, within each gender. June 2026.
| Brand | Women | Men | Men ÷ Women |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round Lab | 0.47 | 1.05 | 2.23 |
| Torriden | 1.51 | 2.06 | 1.36 |
| Isntree | 0.42 | 0.50 | 1.19 |
| Some By Mi | 0.08 | 0.08 | 1.00 |
| Goodal | 0.39 | 0.31 | 0.79 |
| Aestura | 5.27 | 4.09 | 0.78 |
| Anua | 3.01 | 2.32 | 0.77 |
| Beauty of Joseon | 0.64 | 0.49 | 0.77 |
| SKIN1004 | 1.11 | 0.79 | 0.71 |
| Illiyoon | 2.50 | 1.47 | 0.59 |
| mixsoon | 0.43 | 0.20 | 0.47 |
| Laneige | 1.31 | 0.61 | 0.47 |
| numbuzin | 1.30 | 0.57 | 0.44 |
Every ratio here is the two columns to its left, divided — check our arithmetic if you like. Women's figures average three age bands, men's average two, so the ratios carry a little rounding slack.
Round Lab is the headline. Abroad, the 1025 Dokdo Toner is sold as a gentle, minimalist toner for sensitive skin, and the English-language audience for that pitch is overwhelmingly women. In Korean search, Round Lab's standing among men is 2.23 times its standing among women — the widest gender gap in our dataset, in the direction almost nobody would predict from the marketing.
Torriden leans the same way. At the other end, numbuzin, Laneige and mixsoon are strongly women-weighted, and Illiyoon — despite being one of Korea's biggest names — sits at 0.59.
Check price: Round Lab 1025 Dokdo Toner — Stylevana · Amazon
The Age Split
Same idea, now across women's age bands. COSRX = 1.00 within each band.
| Brand | Women 20s | Women 30s | Women 40s | 40s ÷ 20s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty of Joseon | 0.44 | 0.75 | 0.72 | 1.64 |
| Anua | 2.49 | 2.74 | 3.79 | 1.52 |
| Aestura | 4.08 | 5.90 | 5.82 | 1.43 |
| mixsoon | 0.37 | 0.45 | 0.46 | 1.24 |
| SKIN1004 | 1.01 | 1.09 | 1.22 | 1.21 |
| Illiyoon | 1.94 | 3.38 | 2.17 | 1.12 |
| Round Lab | 0.50 | 0.45 | 0.45 | 0.90 |
| Laneige | 1.42 | 1.49 | 1.03 | 0.73 |
| Some By Mi | 0.10 | 0.08 | 0.07 | 0.70 |
| Goodal | 0.45 | 0.42 | 0.31 | 0.69 |
| Torriden | 1.68 | 1.71 | 1.13 | 0.67 |
| numbuzin | 1.89 | 1.10 | 0.93 | 0.49 |
| Isntree | 0.61 | 0.41 | 0.22 | 0.36 |
Two patterns worth your attention.
Beauty of Joseon and Anua get more popular with age in Korea. Both are marketed abroad largely to a young audience; in Korean search both index highest among women in their 40s. Anua's standing among 40s women (3.79) is over half again its standing among 20s (2.49).
numbuzin and Isntree are the genuinely young-skewed brands. Isntree's 40s figure is barely a third of its 20s figure — the steepest age gradient here. If you're in your twenties and want what Korean women your age are actually looking up, those two are on the list and Beauty of Joseon isn't, at least not disproportionately.
Illiyoon peaks in the 30s (3.38), which fits a brand whose range is built around family-sized ceramide body care rather than a viral single product.
Check price: numbuzin No.3 Serum — Stylevana · Amazon
Why This Matters When You Buy
"Popular in Korea" is not a fact about Korea — it's a fact about a slice of Korea. Every brand here is popular with someone. The question worth asking is whether that someone resembles you, and export marketing rarely tells you.
A brand's export positioning is a guess about you, not a report about Korea. Round Lab abroad is positioned toward women; in Korean search its relative standing is more than twice as high among men. Neither fact makes the toner better or worse for your skin — but if you assumed you were buying what young Korean women swear by, the data doesn't support that assumption.
Age gradients are the most useful thing here. If you're in your 40s, Anua and Aestura index highest among Korean women your age. In your 20s, numbuzin and Isntree do. That's a more grounded starting point than a viral video.
And the same honesty applies to us as last time. We've written about Beauty of Joseon more than any other brand on this site — a brand that, in Korea, skews older than the audience most K-beauty content (ours included) is written for. We're publishing the number rather than quietly correcting it.
Where to Buy
Picks by the group Korean search says the brand actually over-indexes with.
| Store | Pick | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Stylevana | → numbuzin No.3 Serum on Stylevana | Korea's most 20s-women-skewed brand here (1.89 → 0.93 by 40s) |
| Amazon | → numbuzin No.3 Serum on Amazon | fast / Prime · auto-localized |
| Stylevana | → Round Lab 1025 Dokdo Toner on Stylevana | indexes 2.23x higher among Korean men than women |
| Stylevana | → Illiyoon Ceramide Ato Concentrate Cream on Stylevana | peaks with women in their 30s (3.38) |
Prices move with sales; check before buying. Affiliate disclosure applies.
Sources
- Naver DataLab — search trend index by age band and gender, 14 brand groups, five demographic slices, June 2025 – June 2026 (retrieved 17 July 2026 via Naver's open API)
- Age bands per Naver's segmentation: 19–29 ("20s"), 30–39 ("30s"), 40–49 ("40s")
Related reading: What Korea searches vs. what you can buy · How we evaluate · Korean ceramide and barrier basics