Nine of TikTok Shop's top ten skincare sellers are Korean

TikTok Shop has become one of the places Americans discover skincare. This week's list shows how much of that discovery is Korean.

The top of the list

Fact. Nine of the ten highest-ranked skincare listings on TikTok Shop this week are from Korean brands: Sungboon Editor at #1, EPAIS at #2, Dr.Melaxin three times, and medicube four times in the top ten. The only exception is the American brand tarte, at #4. Observation. Across all 98 listings, at least 58 are Korean. Inference. On this platform, Korean skincare is not a niche inside the category — at the top of the list, it is the category.

A different measure from the retail shelf

This is not the same kind of number as our retail shelf read. TikTok Shop's ranking is an estimate of sales from a commercial data provider; Ulta, Sephora, Amazon, Target and Walmart publish their own best-seller lists. So we don't put them on one chart. What we can say is that the two point the same way: on those five retail lists this week, K-beauty was 63 of 492 products, about 13%. On TikTok Shop's skincare list it is several times that.

How to read this

We report brands, not individual products, for US channels. "At least 58" is deliberate: a few listings on this week's capture could not be read cleanly enough to name a brand, so the true count may be slightly higher, not lower. One week is a snapshot.