34 K-Beauty Products You'll Wish You'd Found Sooner
A satin-finish TirTir cushion foundation that offers an unheard-of 72 hours of wear while blending perfectly to conceal blemishes, redness, and under-eye circles. The buildable formula lets you achieve *just* the right amount of coverage for your needs. It also contains hibiscus and red propolis extracts to help enhance your skin's elasticity. And!!! The oval-shaped puff is great for reaching every inch of your face.
I Dew Care's dry shampoo powder — a *non*aerosol option made with Korean ginseng to help revive limp, greasy hair and add volume. It's a fine, hypoallergenic powder that absorbs oil, sweat, and dirt to keep locks looking fresh longer. Your hair is gonna be soo thankful you finally found this gem.
A TikTok-famous overnight collagen mask to give your parched skin a giant gulp of hydration while you catch some Z's. It'll also help reduce the appearance of enlarged pores while firming the skin and boosting elasticity. Wake up and peel it off to reveal visibly tighter, smoother skin that looks like a dream — a dream you'll wish you had much earlier in life.
Medicube's dual-textured toner pads, which are super easy to use and come soaked in lactic and salicylic acid. They'll gently exfoliate your skin and reduce the visibility of pores. It's earned the #1 spot on Amazon's best facial toner list for a reason.
A Nooni tinted appleberry lip oil for creating the most kissable pout with a moisturizing formula that won't leave your mouth a sticky mess — who knew? It contains vitamins A, C, and E, and soothing apple water for a lip upgrade you can feel good about!
Cosrx Snail Mucin 96% Power Repairing Essence because believe it or not, snails have the healing touch. Bonus: This refreshing formula can be used on all skin types! Reviewers love how well it helps heal acne, inflammation, peeling, fine lines, and more. Try not to grieve too hard for all the time you spent living without it.
And a lightweight Cosrx mild gel cleanser so you can wash your face without the constant worry that you're stripping your face dry. The low-pH formula contains BHA and tea tree oil to help protect your face from irritants while also strengthening the skin barrier.
Torriden hyaluronic acid serum complete with *five* types of HA molecules in a fast-absorbing formula that packs a MASSIVE punch of moisture when you need it most. Your skin will stay wonderfully hydrated and smooth thanks to this lightweight, non-sticky serum!
Laneige's Neo Blurring Powder to help *instantly* matte-ify your skin while still maintaining its natural glow thanks to the blue hyaluronic acid. It even comes in a mess-free, travel-friendly case so you can take it on the go! Your only regret will be not discovering it sooner.
And their super glowy lip balm, aka a silky-smooth balm with a lightweight but high-shine finish. Wear it solo OR on top of your fave lip color for the perf finishing touch. Most importantly, you'll say goodbye to previous sticky-icky lip balms that make your question your life choices.
An Elizavecca carbonated clay mask, which will help your skin breathe easier — this stuff eradicates sebum *without* stripping your face of its natural oils. Reviewers swear by it for stellar exfoliation *and* blackhead removal. It's also just really fun to use when you need a silly lil' pick-me-up. 🙃
The Face Shop's facial foaming cleanser if you wanna simplify your daily routine with a do-it-all face wash that helps you accomplish all your skin goals: cleanse, moisturize, brighten, and remove makeup! You *and* your newfound K-beauty routine can thank me later.
A SeoulCeuticals toner mist that'll earn a *permanent* spot in your beauty routine once you experience its dewy effects. This skincare juggernaut is made up of 98% naturally derived ingredients such as soothing aloe, rejuvenating cucumber, and antioxidant-rich green tea that'll make your skin glow like never before. It hydrates, plumps, and helps treat blemishes while preventing future breakouts.
Mixsoon Bean Essence when you're ready to leave ineffective skincare products behind for good — this revolutionary formula hydrates *and* exfoliates at the same time. Ingredients such as fermented bean, barley, and pomegranate help get rid of dead skin cells while improving your skin tone. Best of all? No sticky residue!!
An Innisfree daily UV defense sunscreen you'll probably always have on hand because it's one of those holy grail products that you absolutely dread running out of. It contains SPF 36 for sun protection, green tea for reducing redness and irritation, and sunflower oil to nourish the skin. Most importantly, it doesn't leave behind a ghostly white cast and will have your face glowing all day long.
And some peptide patches for blocking out 98% of UV rays because, hello, you don't have a 10-step skincare routine just to have your under-eyes demolished by sun damage. These look like stickers and have an impressive UPF 50+ rating *plus* they're enriched with hydrating peptides to help brighten your skin. Oh, they're also water- and sweat-resistant so you don't have to worry about them staying put.
An adorable Tonymoly octopus-shaped blackhead remover to help target excess sebum and other impurities that might be clogging your precious pores. After cleansing, rub it on your face to exfoliate *and* eliminate stubborn blackheads and whiteheads!
A Beauty of Joseon eye serum if you've been searching high and low for a product that'll actually do a number on your under-eye bags — it might even lead to tears of joy. It uses a powerful trifecta of retinol, niacinamide, and ginseng to lessen the appearance of wrinkles, boost skin elasticity, and illuminate your skin so you'll be looking extra radiant and glowy in no time.
An Anua heartleaf pore-clearing cleansing oil, which will remove all traces of makeup while sucking the stubborn sebum from your pores, leaving you with skin that's visibly clearer and smoother! Once you see the results, you'll be low-key devastated that you waited so long to try it.
And!!! Anua soothing toner — it can calm irritation and deliver the ~glass skin~ look you've been chasing ever since it erupted on TikTok! It refreshes your complexion by gently balancing your skin's pH so it can better absorb your other skincare products.
Annndd their 10% niacinamide serum that targets dull areas and leaves your face feeling soft to the touch while strengthening the skin barrier. It also contains 4% tranexamic acid and 2% arbutin to minimize the appearance of pores, visibly brighten dark spots, and help even out your skin tone.
A bottle of Peach & Lily's Glass Skin Refining Serum for anyone chasing the TikTok "glazed donut" skin trend with no luck...until now. You've just found the K-Beauty secret that'll leave your face lookin' extra glazed 🍩 while also helping to hydrate, brighten, and firm your skin. Where has this been all your life??
Kahi Wrinkle Bounce Hydrating Multi-Balm, a K-beauty staple that TikTok is rightfully obsessed with because it's an all-in-one magic stick for your face, eyes, lips, and neck. This moisturizer uses collagen and salmon complex to help minimize fine lines and enhance your natural glow. One order of glass skin, comin' right up!
A Krave Beauty matcha hemp cleanser, aka a soothing gel formula worthy of a top slot in your skincare rotation for its calming, hydrating effects. It'll gently remove makeup, sunscreen, and dirt without causing irritation. I think it's safe to say you've met your ~matcha~.
Elizabeth Mott's Thank Me Later Eye Primer I bet you'll tell all your friends about to ensure they don't miss out on this K-Beauty sensation either. It keeps your eye makeup intact ALL day long without any smudging or creasing. Take that, oily eyelids!
And an Elizabeth Mott blurring face primer with SPF 30 because some products really can do it all — this one will not only blur pores but soften the appearance of fine lines *and* protect against harmful UV rays. It's perfect for prepping skin for makeup or you can wear it solo.
A Beauty of Joseon serum that'll deliver the skincare glow-up you've been dreaming of. It contains a heavenly combo of niacinamide and propolis extract to help lighten dark spots and leave you with a dewy complexion that'll have you ready for your close-up.
A kimchii gel cleanser with antimicrobial properties, which can work wonders for reducing bacteria and preventing pesky pimples. The secret? Fermented radish, kimchi, and 2% salicylic acid. Your skin will feel perfectly exfoliated *and* look so much smoother and brighter — if only you found it years ago.
A goami rice toner if you've been spending way too much time mourning dry skin without any solution in sight. This toner will give you a much-needed kick of hydration. It contains vegetable-originated extracts for soft, smooth, and glowy skin that doesn't feel sticky or greasy.
Skin1004's pore tightening and lifting masks to hydrate, tighten, and minimize the appearance of pores and fine lines. Leave it on for 15 minutes and wash it off to reveal your au naturale glow. Mark my words, this is about to become a *must* during your future self-care nights!
The Saem hydrating eye stick infused with the magic of Icelandic mineral water, moss extract, and seaweed extract — it'll revitalize your under-eye area *and* help improve your skin's elasticity and reduce the appearance of dark circles! How have you survived without this for so long?
OR! A nourishing Etude House eye cream when you're seeking a new series regular in your K-beauty routine — that's how well it can hydrate and firm the delicate skin around your eyes! It can also help prevent fine lines while leaving your skin silky soft to the touch.
A dark-spot correcting serum so you can address the hyperpigmentation that's been bothering you to no end. This game-changing serum contains 5% niacinamide, papaya extract, and plant-derived squalane to help fade dark spots and leave you with a smooth, even complexion.
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Each new surge showed straight-laced pop fans that there was always more happening on the outskirts of their favorite genre. 'With songwriting, it's interesting because the pop punk and emo genres [have] simple chord progressions, not a lot of parts, very clear concept, good emotional lyrics, really catchy melodies, are highly energetic — that's essentially pop music,' says producer and songwriter Andrew Goldstein, whose collaborators have spanned from Blink-182 and Bring Me the Horizon to Addison Rae and Britney Spears. 'Most pop music is three to four chords, a really catchy melody, and a concept that almost anyone can understand. That's what really connects with people. Those similarities are what really allows for these artists to become a lot bigger.' Pop-punk first sunk its teeth into Goldstein at the turn of the millennium. He came across New Found Glory and Sum 41, as well as emo leaders Taking Back Sunday and Thursday, but it was Blink-182 that rewired him musically. Finding them right on the cusp of Enema of the State made him want to pick up a guitar and connect with an audience the way that his new favorite band did with him. 'I remember my friend's older brother was like, 'Oh, they sold out,'' he says. 'If somebody becomes popular, it's easy to say that they're selling out because there's different steps you have to take to accommodate the fan base.' Playing bigger venues, mass ordering merchandise, recording in high-tech studios — all of that could be considered selling out. For pop fans, it's unfathomable that anyone would want anything else. That was the case with 5SOS. 'We always said from the beginning, we want to be as big as fucking possible,' Clifford says. Coming from Australia, they had to make their shot count. Before they'd released any music of their own, 5SOS shared A Day to Remember and Go Radio covers alongside renditions of One Direction and Justin Bieber tracks on YouTube. Green Day and Blink-182's influence was impossible to ignore across their self-titled debut album, released in 2014, and the lasting impression of acts like Mayday Parade and All Time Low appeared clearly on its follow-up, Sounds Good Feels Good. But their sticky melodies and hooks always wore the touch of pop, too. 'That style of music had taken such a downturn, and nobody was into it,' Clifford says of the pop-punk scene at the time. 'We were like, 'Well, hold on, we have a good idea where we can bring that back into the mainstream.' And, yes, there are going to have to be some changes when you evolve to bring that style of music somewhere else.' 5SOS leaned into 'the traits people were liking about boy band culture' since it was 'all anyone would fucking talk about,' anyway; but they were still 'longing for acceptance from a community that we were so passionately representing.' It came at a cost. 'We were just shunned by the community instantly,' Clifford says. 'They sort of just looked at how we looked and wrote it off.' If the genre wanted to thrive and survive, it couldn't keep treating pop success like a death sentence. 'Sometimes people are ahead of the curve, and it takes time for them to realize the brilliance of a record when it comes out,' says producer-songwriter John Feldmann, whose sprawling credits include Panic! at the Disco's Vices & Virtues. Change can be hard — and there was no tougher time for OG pop-punk fans than 2013. They were already reeling from My Chemical Romance breaking up and feeling disconnected from Panic! at the Disco's directional shift on Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die. They were also being reintroduced to Fall Out Boy following an extended hiatus while Paramore marked the beginning of a creative transformation with an explosive crossover hit. Feldmann saw Paramore lay the foundation for that moment years prior, when he first heard 'That's What You Get,' a blazing rock track from Riot! with an undeniable hook. He remembers Fueled by Ramen founder John Janick telling him, 'We can't put this out. It's too early for this band. They can't be that popular quite yet.' They'd already broken through with 'Misery Business,' but this could have gotten them stuck on the other side. 'With pop, it's harder to create a legacy because it takes a lot of time,' says Goldstein. 'It takes a lot of fans.' Fans in the pop-punk scene fostered a different sense of loyalty than pop did, and they expected it to be reciprocated. Paramore's progression to that point needed to be natural in order for it to work. 'You can really see the writing on the wall with that song,' Feldmann says. 'You know how 'Still Into You' became one of their biggest songs? That was already set up with 'That's What You Get.'' By 2013, Paramore were on their fourth album and umpteenth lineup change. They'd get nothing but false security out of moving backwards and rehashing the music they already made while clearly yearning to evolve. It's understandable why listeners would crave the kind of music they discovered during their formative years. 'Those are the records that shape your whole existence,' Feldmann adds, but notes that 'every artist should be able to experiment and not be harassed for expanding their sonic horizon.' It's the same crossroad Fall Out Boy faced when they recorded their fifth album, Save Rock & Roll. 'I wasn't interested in making a pop punk record with anybody. I was kind of burned out on that, just like I think most people were,' producer Butch Walker tells Rolling Stone. 'They didn't care about that. They were like, 'No, we're gonna lose a lot of fans, but we need to make new fans. We need to appeal to a whole new generation of people. Or why are we doing this? We're not growing as a band.'' When they re-entered the pop arena at the time, it was dominated by artists like Rihanna, One Direction, and Macklemore. Their lane was wide open. For an entire wave of pop fans, the band helped translate pop-punk into a format they could easily access. When Fall Out Boy released 'My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark,' Taylor Swift told her 25 million Twitter followers that she'd listened to it 43 times in one day. 'I love Fall Out Boy so much,' Swift told Rolling Stone in 2019. 'Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it.' The two acts shared a collaborator in Walker, who can recall the first time he heard Green Day's Dookie in a Nebraska parking lot as clearly as he can remember Swift showing him 'Everything Has Changed' the morning she wrote it. As producer, he had 'no notes.' The Red single arrived in near-perfect shape, even with the bathroom tiles reverberating through the voice note. Walker ranks Swift as 'one of the best songwriters in pop music ever,' and expresses the same enthusiasm when praising Pete Wentz. 'She made the right call by being influenced by that, because I think that is the DNA in her music,' he says. When Walker first encountered Fall Out Boy, they were unsigned, 'a fucking trainwreck on stage,' and already writing ingenious lyrics. 'How are they thinking this big and how are they thinking this poetically?' he remembers wondering. 'Pete has just got a way with words like no one else.' 'My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark' ended up being Fall Out Boy's biggest hit since 'Thnks Fr Th Mmrs.' For Walker, it represents 'a classic example of a band taking the guard rails off, taking the boundaries off, pushing the walls down.' The song started with John Hill during pitch sessions for another artist's album, but collected dust for a year before Walker played the rough demo for the band. They lunged for it. 'The guys were like, 'That's our sound. That's our new record. Urgent, powerful, hooky, dirty, loud, aggressive — but poppy.' During our call, Walker digs up that original voice note and hits play. It confirms that the melody of the chorus has always been that irresistible. 'Do you want to hear the punch line?' he asks. 'That was actually written for Rihanna.' It's intriguing to imagine what the pop star could have done with it. The closest we've gotten to Rock Rihanna is Rated R's 'Rockstar 101' with Slash and 'Disturbia' — not the original Good Girl Gone Bad single, but the cover The Cab recorded for Punk Goes Pop in 2009. 'Punk Goes Pop was such a tremendous thing,' Goldstein says of the Fearless Records compilation series in which pop songs get rock makeovers. 'It showed the strength of good songs. It was a big gateway into pop music for people to be like, 'Wow, I like the song, it's just maybe I don't like the presentation of it.'' Mayday Parade and Pierce the Veil reimagined Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know,' and years later State Champs revamped Shawn Mendes' 'Stitches.' Punk Goes Pop offered the best of both worlds. 'There was something about these pop songs that I already knew all the lyrics to because they were constantly on the radio suddenly having screams and heavy guitars and drums,' says Ada Juarez, drummer in the pop-punk band Meet Me @ the Altar. During their live shows, they often cover Kelly Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' and Jonas Brothers' 'Burnin' Up' with an intense rock edge. 5SOS, who they joined on the road in 2023, did the same with Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream' early in their career. 'Everyone who would come see us was like, 'Dude, if you guys could write a song like 'Teenage Dream,' you'd be the biggest band in the world,' Clifford recalls. 'And I was like, 'Well, that is the hardest fucking thing to do.'' And while it's essential for a song to be great, the performance has to be convincing, too. 'If you go to completely what your fans want, you could please them very well, but it might not connect,' says Goldstein. 'But if you go too far into, 'Man, I'm going to make something mainstream' or 'What do people want? What's relevant right now?' — that's when you can get in trouble. It doesn't sound real anymore. I can tell what you were referencing and it's that song that was out six months ago. By the time the record comes out, whatever sound you were going for is done.' When pop-punk surged back into the mainstream in 2020, fueled by lockdown angst and Machine Gun Kelly, corners of the industry rushed to capitalize on it. 'You guys have to jump back on and do what you did in the beginning,'' Clifford recalls being told. 5SOS are more pop than punk these days, though the guitarist's recently-released debut solo album Sidequest does revive those influences. 'We were all very clearly like, no,' he says. 'It wasn't our place.' Other artists figured it was worth a shot. For years, Demi Lovato's OG fans yearned for her return to rock. Her Disney-era records were influential in showing a young audience that they could be rockstars, too. But when she finally gave in with Holy Fvck in 2022, it failed to crossover despite her pop capital and emo kid roots. 'It definitely felt just like a cash grab, in a way,' Meet Me @ the Altar's Edith Victoria says. 'Had she done that years prior, I think we all would have loved it.' The prior year, breakout star Olivia Rodrigo drew comparisons to Hayley Williams, Avril Lavigne, and Alanis Morissette when her pop-punk singles 'Good 4 U' and 'Brutal' crashed onto the Hot 100, establishing her as a genre-transcending force. 'Olivia Rodrigo pushed that genre further than anybody else in as long as I can remember,' Clifford says. 'She took the DNA and the foundation of what made pop-punk and gave it this fresh new life.' When she leaned into the sound even more on Guts, it never felt contrived. Feldmann praises 'All-American Bitch,' drawing parallels to the alternative edge of Sonic Youth and Green Day. To his credit, Machine Gun Kelly also 'opened the doors for a lot of people to be influenced by him, to make whatever pop-punk music will turn into in the future,' Juarez says, just like Paramore and Pierce the Veil did for them. 'It's just evolving forever.' At this point in 2025, nothing on the Hot 100 sounds even slightly reminiscent of pop-punk. The familiar is prevailing. But another surge could be right around the corner. The hardcore punk band Turnstile could open the gateway with their new genre-blurring album Never Enough, or Pierce the Veil could ride the unexpected viral fervor swelling on TikTok around their deep cut 'So Far So Fake' straight through pop's barricade. If the next installation in Beyoncé's genre-shifting album trilogy really is rock, that could be another prominent entry point for the bands who can't wait to sell out. They don't have to fit into the pop landscape immediately. They just have to go for it. It's that passion that keeps pop-punk's perpetual love affair alive. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
