Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Finding the right shade of makeup can be a struggle, especially if you have really fair or dark skin. But things are changing and some brands are using new AI skin matching tech to be more inclusive. So will we ever get to a point where everyone can find their perfect match? That's what we're exploring today on What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart.
With me in the studio is BBC reporter Soo Min Kim. Welcome to the podcast. Tell me about how you match your makeup to your skin colour. I guess I look at both like undertones and overtones of my skin when it comes to like picking colours for foundation and blushes. Back when I was in Korea, I did this personal colour testing where like a professional colour analyst would
We'll basically put those colored drapes underneath your bare face to kind of find the optimal color that would brighten your natural complexion. So I found out that I have this cool undertone with pinky hues underneath. So like anything that's cool toned foundation with pink or rosy blushes would work well on me. Talk me through how color matching actually works. You mentioned overtones, undertones, shades.
So overtone is basically the surface color of your skin. And undertone is the subtle color that's underneath your overall skin tone that wouldn't change. So there are three different undertones. There's warm undertone, cool undertone, and something called neutral, which could pull out both colors.
So warm undertone would have this golden yellowish undertone colors and cool tones more of pink, purple, bluish undertone colors.
We spoke to some beauty influencers to see what they thought. Oceane Comtois is an albino beauty influencer in Canada. So what's it like finding a colour match for her? Challenging, difficult to say the least. I think there's a wide variety of, you know, fair complexion products. None of them are made light enough to match my complexion.
And a lot of them are often too warm. They're not, you know, cool tone. So for anybody with like a cool undertone, it is a little bit more challenging to find a product. They exist. They're just hard to come by and they're usually quite pricey.
I struggled to find products in my adolescence that would work for my skin tone. But in recent years, I've been able to shop in places that I've traditionally never really been able to shop in before or find a product in. And this is May Akhtar, a beauty influencer here in the UK. When I was younger, I didn't even bother because a lot of the time, you
you know, I was going for the drugstore makeup brands, they didn't have my shade whatsoever, like, it's not even like they didn't have it in stock, a lot of the time, it didn't go past a certain shade, and, you know, I struggled a lot with that, so I just didn't really end up shopping for them, we're in the age of social media, now if a brand brings out a
a bad shade range. They get called out, there's repercussions, less people buy from them, you know, there's bad press. Whereas back in the day, there wasn't really that much of that. Absolutely, brands have changed. You know, when a new brand launched and they launched with 50 shades, I think that was groundbreaking because it triggered so many other brands to like look internally and think we should have been doing that the whole time. And again, with social media, because people were getting called up on it,
you know, evoked a lot of brands to,
make the right decision and do what they should have been doing this whole time. It's changed massively. Like I can definitely find my shade. I don't ever have a problem with any brand really finding my right foundation shade. However, the undertone is the issue, especially when it gets to like brown and black skin, the either too orange or too red. And here is Adam Triantis. He's a cosmetic scientist and he's also the co-founder of the makeup brand Decipher.
We asked him why some makeup brands don't have wider ranges. Traditional makeup brands will typically have a target consumer in mind when they're creating a range. And this will determine what formulas they want to create and what shade range they're going to have. In the past,
This would lead some brands to have 15, 20 shades of which there may be one or two darker shades. Brands can no longer really get away with this due to diversity and inclusion. There is always this distinct variance between brands with kind of huge tone ranges and some with relatively few. And in the end, this comes down to economics. If you imagine that you have 50 shades, then you're
you are in the hundreds of thousands to possibly millions of units. And this makes it very difficult and very risky to both launch a foundation brand, but also to reformulate it and get it stocked. Because if it doesn't work as you planned, you end up with a huge amount of stock.
Sue, I want to talk a bit about K-Beauty Korean cosmetics because you're from Korea. K-Beauty is everywhere. Everyone seems to love it. People doing review videos all over TikTok, but it has come under fire for not having particularly diverse shade ranges. What's your experience of K-Beauty been like?
I mean, growing up in South Korea where taking care of your skin is sort of ingrained in the culture, it has been part of me since I was young. You'll constantly see those new products with new formulas and new ingredients and people testing them out and reviewing them. So I've been pretty experimental when it comes to like new beauty products. Whenever there's a new trend pops up, I'd like to try them out for myself and see how it works on my skin and, you know, to understand why it's popular.
But it wasn't until recently that I realized just how limited color options we have in Korean beauty brands. To put things into perspective, Korea isn't really a diverse country. I know the number of foreign residents is growing at the moment, but it only makes up about 5.2% of the total population. So historically, Korean beauty brands has been catering to the local dominant market, which is why there are
just limited colors for the dominant group of consumers. That is now changing because K-beauty products are being exported all over the world. There are growing markets in lots of different places. What is it about Korean beauty products that make them so popular outside of South Korea? I think...
A lot of it comes from the Korean wave. Korean dramas, K-pop, Korean films. A lot of the users and influencers that I've interviewed in different countries, they've mentioned that they first came across Korean beauty products through those Korean content. They see their favorite idols and actors with glowing healthy skin on screen and mentioning certain product in their skincare routine, they became curious about Korean beauty products and wanted to try them out.
And they've also mentioned the reasonable price and high quality of these products worked out for them as well. And comparing the prices to these global Western brands. And right now, you know, with more global recognition of Korean brands, you see those brands doing pop-up stores in different global cities. And these big global retailers like Sephora carrying Korean products has become a lot more accessible in general. So what kind of numbers do we have for the industry?
So according to the Korea Health Industry Development Institute, right now the domestic market is valued at around over $11 billion. But if you look at exports, South Korea has become a key player in the global market. So in 2023, South Korea was the second largest cosmetic exporter right behind France.
And a more exciting update is that for the first time ever, Korean cosmetic exports surpassed $10 billion in 2024, just last year, which is a 20% increase from a previous year. So the global market is nearly as big as the domestic market now. Yeah. What are some of the biggest markets globally for K-beauty products?
So right now, the biggest market for Korean cosmetics is China with over $2 billion in exports. And the second biggest market is the United States with just a little over $1.24 billion in exports in 2024. And which are some of the kind of growing upcoming markets? Yeah, it's interesting how that will shift in the coming years because right now we're seeing increase in exports from the countries in the Middle East and some of the emerging markets in Southeast Asia and Africa.
So the market is growing across Africa. Gloria Acheng is a BBC reporter in Nairobi, and she sent us this. So Korean culture is quite big in Kenya. We're seeing a lot of women using Korean skincare products. Even when you go to these cosmetic shops nowadays, you have to find a corner that is definitely selling Korean skincare products. We also have Korean shops where people can get Korean snacks, Korean alcohol, and we also have a
K-drama fan base where people watch Korean drama and they even review this drama online. So I think Korean culture is quite big here and it's definitely, definitely gaining a lot of popularity. You find that a lot of cosmetic companies are now using social media to market these products and they're working with people like African influencers,
who are using these products on African skin. And of course, when an African influencer is using a product on a skin that looks like yours as an African woman, you tend to believe them more because they look like you. As the number of markets grows, Korean Beauty is, of course, having to adapt its products. What are some of the ways that they're changing?
So a lot of the companies are launching their new darker shade range, new darker foundations and blushes for darker skin tones and even the lip products for darker skin tones. I've spoke with Colmar Korea, which is an ODM company, original design manufacturer that carries product for over 3,700 Korean brands.
And they mentioned that about 20% of their clients, Korean brands, have requested them to develop products for darker skin tones. So they've been running this in-depth long-term color research just to develop the right formulas. So they brought in these focus groups from Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and other regions to run this real color matching test. What do they find in this research? Are they going to change the formulas? Yes.
So they found this key issue during their research. Titanium dioxide, which is an ingredient that's commonly used for Korean cushion foundation that has a white pigment.
It doesn't really work for darker skin tones. So while it has this nice coverage, smooth finish on lighter skin tones, it creates rather a dull, ashy look on darker skin tones. So they had to completely reformulate their cushion foundation formula. And also they realized that darker skin tone has a wider color spectrum that they have to cover, which means they have to make a lot more colors than for lighter skin tones.
So one of the benefits of cushion foundation is that one color often adapts to multiple skin tones within a close range.
But for darker skin tones, they found out it doesn't really work out. They actually had to make various color tones in order to match with darker skin tones in a wider spectrum. What do beauty influencers think of K-beauty? Here's May again. I do think K-beauty could be what the market needs. A lot of the time they will cater to the population that are in Korea. So obviously that means that
shade ranges will cater to like a paler person, a paler complexion. And while I can see why that is, obviously as they're marketing towards the more like Western markets, that shade range does need to change. And I have seen a lot of K-beauty brands really expanding their shades and sometimes better. Like sometimes they get the actual undertones correct, but then sometimes they can either put too much black pigment in their foundations or
things like that. So it does have a way to go. - And here's Oceane again. - Consumers are having a lot more discussion about inclusivity in the beauty space. And ultimately I think brands need to align their values with their consumers' values. And I think if K-beauty is meeting that need, then incredible, amazing. But I think that ultimately any brand who has those shared values and who is putting those values into practice could meet that market need.
Adam from Decipher, who we heard from earlier, mentioned how a lot of the reason that there hasn't been diversity historically is because of financial limitations, right? And it would cost more to formulate so many different types and shade ranges. And he and Decipher have come up with a solution. So let's hear from him now talking about how they use AI for on-demand colour matching. We don't really have...
completely set formulas and we don't have a set shade range so essentially when a consumer comes to our website they're
um where they ask them some questions and then we scan their skin tone using a ai computer vision model and create a recipe from scratch thinking about what are the exact percentages of pigment of white black yellow red different pigments um what other ingredients need to be included what level of coverage and
the finish and how that might affect the colour and then those are mixed together and we send them to the customer. So maybe that's the future. Maybe more companies will be more agile and use things like AI to make more on-demand products to match their customers' needs. And of course we can't talk about the diversity in skincare without mentioning brands like Fenty which was one of the first to have shade ranges for multiple skin tones. Now lots of others are following suit.
Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast, Sue. Thank you for having me, Hannah. And thank you for joining us. This is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart and we'll see you next time.