Five Reasons We Love Glow Recipe
We can’t believe we’re just learning about Glow Recipe, the one-stop shop for Korean beauty solutions you once thought inaccessible due to geographic or language boundaries. The US-based founders have just made their first foray into a physical retail presence this month with a pop-up at Lane Crawford that runs until Christmas day, and have curated a few sensible and exclusive gift sets that will allow customers to test-drive a number of lines and products, from a five-piece skincare starter kit to a more targeted Poreless Glow collection. You can catch our interview with founder Sarah Lee in an upcoming print issue, but for now, here's a few reasons we'll be stopping by Lane Crawford's beauty emporium before Santa makes his rounds.
It’s K-beauty for dummies
Part of Glow Recipe’s business model is brand incubation, which means they advise Korean beauty companies on how to repackage and market the products in a way that makes sense to non-Korean consumers. Hello, English names and instructions!
It’s available at Lane Crawford
The products carried by Glow Recipe aren’t priced astronomically, so having luxury behemoth Lane Crawford’s stamp of approval means a lot in terms of credibility. Plus, having the gift sets available at a brick-and-mortar operator means you can check out in person the elegant, minimal gift sets – our fave is the 10 Days to Glow Mask Set, which features so many innovative masks we can’t wait to try, from a sea-kelp sheet to an oil and cotton duet.
It’s all natural
If it’s on the site, it won’t contain any harsh ingredients or crazy chemicals. The founders vet brands from head to toe with a testing panel of 18 beauty-loving women featuring a cross section of skin types, ethnicities and ages.
Its YouTube channel is on point
You’ve got enough quickie tutorials and product reviews – close to 100 – to keep you busy for a while, all featuring the founders themselves testing, analyzing and explaining everything you can find on the site, from how the heck a rubber mask really works to solutions for acne-prone skin to skincare secrets of poreless Korean celebs.
Twenty years of experience doesn’t lie
Founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang worked at L’Oreal in Korea and the US covering marketing and product development. In fact, one of Lee’s projects before striking out on her own was Lancôme’s cushion compact – a product, as we know, that’s inspired by Korean innovations.
