Key ingredients in beauty products – and their skin transforming abilities – have been big news for a while now.
We’ve all become familiar with hyaluronic acid, glycolic acid, vitamin C and the like.
Lesser known ingredients like ginseng, snail mucin and centella asiatica have also had their time in the skincare spotlight.
What many of these things have in common is they first became influential in skincare created in South Korea. Known as an innovative beauty incubator of trends and advanced formulation over the past few years, the rise in K-beauty has been swift and has often determined the moves of other global skincare brands as well as smaller independent players.
Naturally this means the eyes of the world are on what’s emerging and trending in the beauty-savvy nation.
A new report created by consumer data analyst Spate has given some hints about what ingredients are in focus right now.
Looking at trends from South Korea’s leading search engine, Naver, Spate pinpointed the most significant increase in average monthly searches for each ingredient, according to a report in WWD.
While it wasn’t in the top searches, Spate cofounder, Yarden Horwitz flagged salmon sperm DNA as one to watch as gaining traction in Korean skin care.
Brands like Kahi Cosmetics have been using the extract of salmon sperm, known as salmon PDRN, in products in recent years. The ingredient is said to improve collagen production.
EGF, the number one search, stands for epidermal growth factor, a type of protein that has been developed for wound healing, but used in skincare is intended to encourage new skin cell growth, boosting collagen and elastin.
According to the WWD piece Spate pinpointed these trending ingredients searched across skin care products in South Korea, ranked by increase in average monthly searches.
- EGF: 15.4K monthly searches
- Enzyme: 8.1K monthly searches
- Heartleaf: 8.9K monthly searches
- Vitamin C: 12.1K monthly searches
- Panthenol: 1.3K monthly searches
- Noni: 3.5K monthly searches
- Ceramide: 11.4K monthly searches
- BHA: 1.1K monthly searches
- Bifida: 950 monthly searches
- Collagen: 74.5K monthly searches
