Anua Is Rising in Korea While the Ingredient It's Named For Cools — 2026 Data

Last time we profiled a single brand, it was the fastest riser in our Korean search set — SKIN1004. This is the second one, and it comes with a puzzle the first didn't.

Anua is up 37% in Korean search over the year to June 2026 — second only to SKIN1004, and far ahead of a field where most brands fell. But heartleaf — 어성초, the ingredient Anua's entire identity is built on — is down 29% in the same window, one of the fastest-cooling ingredient searches in Korea.

A brand climbing while its hero ingredient sinks looks like a contradiction. It isn't. And understanding why is the difference between reading Korean data correctly and misreading it.

How We Measured This

HOW WE EVALUATE

This is Naver DataLab's relative search index, pulled through Naver's open API, for the thirteen complete months ending June 2026. DataLab reports relative interest, never raw volume, and re-scales inside each request — so brand standings here are anchored to COSRX = 1.00 within the same slice, exactly as in our brand-by-demographic piece, while the rise-over-time uses Anua's own month-to-month figures, which don't depend on that anchor.

The distinction that resolves the whole puzzle. A brand search and an ingredient search are not the same signal. People search an ingredient — "heartleaf," "어성초" — when they're still learning it: what is it, does it work, what percentage. They search a brand when they already know what they want and are deciding where to buy. So an ingredient can cool (the explaining phase ends, it becomes normal) at the very moment a brand built on it heats up (it becomes a name people reach for directly). That's not noise. It's what maturity looks like.

What else this can't tell you. Search is attention, not sales. Month to month the index is choppy, so we lean on the shape of the year rather than any single pair of months. Demographic figures average three women's age bands and two men's, because Naver's male-40s data for these brands is too thin to read.

About our method.

Lens 1 — The Rise: A Surge, Then Held High

Anua's year didn't look like SKIN1004's steady climb. It looked like a jump followed by a high plateau.

• It surged through mid-2025, roughly 57 → 92 on its own index between June and August 2025.
• Then it settled and held in the high 70s–high 80s for the rest of the year, ending June 2026 around 78.
• Net, June to June: +37%.

Measured against COSRX, Anua moved from 1.94 in June 2025 to 2.83 in June 2026 — already a large brand a year ago, and a bigger one now, sitting well above the reference either way. Where SKIN1004 is still accelerating, Anua is a brand that broke out and then consolidated at a high level. Both are "rising." They're different kinds of rising, and the difference matters if you're trying to catch a wave versus buy a name that's already established.

Check price: Anua Heartleaf 77 Soothing Toner — Stylevana · Amazon

Lens 2 — The Paradox: A Hot Brand on a Cooling Ingredient

Here's the part worth slowing down for.

In our ingredient index, heartleaf sits low and falling — part of the "cooling canon" alongside snail and cica, ingredients that carried K-beauty into English bathrooms and are now researched less in Korea, not more.

So how is Anua, whose Heartleaf 77 line is the reason most people know the brand, climbing on a sinking ingredient?

Because the ingredient's decline is a decline in curiosity, not in use. Koreans stopped looking heartleaf up because the questions got answered — it became a normal, understood, trusted ingredient. Meanwhile Anua stopped being "that heartleaf brand" and became a name people search directly, the way you search a brand you've already decided to trust. The ingredient matured into the background; the brand matured into the foreground. One number falling and the other rising is exactly what that transition produces.

For a buyer abroad, the practical read is this: don't take heartleaf's cooling search as "heartleaf is over." It's the opposite — it's the sign of an ingredient that's been absorbed as a default. And Anua is the brand that rode it there.

Check price: Anua Heartleaf 77% Clear Pad — Stylevana · Amazon

Lens 3 — Who in Korea Is Searching It

Using the same demographic split as our brand-by-age-and-gender piece, everything relative to COSRX = 1.00 within each group, June 2026:

Anua is a genuinely large brand across the board — every figure here is well above the COSRX reference. It skews female, but only mildly (3.01 vs 2.32). And once again, the age pattern cuts against the marketing: its highest standing is with women in their 40s (3.79), meaningfully above women in their 20s (2.49).

That's the same quiet finding we keep hitting — heartleaf-and-centella brands sold abroad to a young audience tend to index highest with older Korean women, who shop by calming and barrier priorities rather than by virality. If you're in your 40s, Anua is more "for you" in Korea than its export image suggests.

Why This Matters When You Buy

A rising brand on a "declining" ingredient is a green light, not a red one. The ingredient search fell because heartleaf became ordinary and trusted; the brand search rose because Anua became the name attached to it. Neither number says anything bad about the products.

Match the ingredient to your skin, not to the trend line. Heartleaf is a calming-category ingredient, sensible for redness-prone or easily-irritated skin. That's a reason to consider it if that's your skin — not a promise, and not something the search number can tell you. Patch test.

Anua isn't only heartleaf anymore. Its range now reaches into the actives Korea is researching more — its PDRN serum sits on Korea's fourth-most-searched active (our index), and it makes one of the few serums pairing niacinamide with tranexamic acid, Korea's #1 and #3 actives. A brand that broke out on a maturing ingredient and is extending into rising ones is, on the data, doing the sensible thing.

And the honest note, again about us. We built far more of our early coverage around heartleaf and cica than around the brands quietly compounding on top of them. Publishing Anua's rise next to heartleaf's fall — two numbers that look contradictory until you separate brand search from ingredient search — is how we keep the measuring honest.

Where to Buy

Three picks that map to the story: the heartleaf core it rose on, and the rising active it's extending into.

Prices move with sales; check before buying. Affiliate disclosure applies.

Sources

• Naver DataLab — search trend index, brand and demographic groups, June 2025 – June 2026 (retrieved 20 July 2026 via Naver's open API)
• Anua brand momentum is a within-brand June-2025 → June-2026 ratio; cross-brand standing is anchored to COSRX = 1.00 within each slice
• Heartleaf (어성초) figure from our Korean ingredient index, same DataLab source, anchored to hyaluronic acid = 1.00

Related reading: SKIN1004, the brand Korea is searching more · Korea's ingredient search index · Who in Korea searches which brand · How we evaluate