Amazon targets K-beauty hair care as scalp products gain global ground

Amazon Global Selling Korea wants K-beauty brands to do for the scalp what they do for the face, with the platform pledging to help bring 50 Korean hair care brands to Amazon and launch 200 new products in 2027.

Beauty sales by Korean sellers on Amazon nearly doubled in the January-to-September period compared to the same period last year, Amazon Global Selling Korea CEO Shin Hwa-sook said Tuesday at the Amazon Beauty in Seoul 2026 conference at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas in southern Seoul.

About 44 percent of K-beauty products sold in the United States are now bought through Amazon, according to Shin. Shin said the hair care market is about as large as skin care, but K-beauty’s penetration in the category is only about 1 percent.

“I spent a day in Los Angeles in the first week of August and visited four stores,” Shin said. “At the front end cap, where you walk in, makeup and skin care products used to be displayed. What surprised me this time was that I thought they were skin care products, but when I looked closer, there were dozens of hair products.”

“The way we play in skin care has gone straight into hair,” Shin said. “Customers who used to wash their hair with shampoo and conditioner now care for it step by step.”

Some Korean hair care brands are already gaining ground on Amazon. Bitelab, which runs hair care brand Lilyeve, said its sales grew more than 500 percent from January to September after it joined Amazon in 2025, and its scalp ampoule sells about 30,000 units a month on the platform.

Sales of a PDRN scalp serum from Adapt’s brand epais rose about 700 percent during Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sales event in early October compared to the previous week, according to Amazon.

The hair care push, named Project Silk Road, is one of four programs Amazon Global Selling Korea announced for next year. Twenty of the new hair products will launch before Amazon’s Prime Day sales event in 2027.

The other three programs aim to help 50 new sellers each reach $1 million in first-year sales on Amazon’s U.S. store, give seven leading brands dedicated supply chain and marketing support, and launch about 100 Korean brands in Europe.

“A craze cools down at some point, but if we set the standards and keep widening them, it won’t disappear easily,” Shin said.

BY KIM MIN-YOUNG [[email protected]]