The Koreas | Diplomacy | East Asia

K-Beauty’s Brazil Push Signals a New Type of Korean Diplomacy

As strange as it sounds, the Korean beauty industry is playing an increasingly important role in Seoul’s foreign policy calculus. 

K-Beauty products on display at a store in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

During a state visit to Brazil in late July 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung called for a deeper partnership between Brazil and South Korea built on the following three pillars: commercial aircraft, critical minerals, and K-Beauty. While the first two are familiar agenda items across modern strategic partnerships, the third is decidedly not. Cosmetics rarely share space with jet manufacturing and rare earths, and their place on Lee’s diplomatic agenda reveals a lot about the Korean beauty industry’s growing role in Seoul’s foreign policy calculus. 

Lee’s comment came at a Korea-Brazil business roundtable in São Paulo on July 28, where alongside delegations from companies like Samsung and HD Hyundai, the CEOs of K-Beauty titans AmorePacific Holdings, APR, Goodai Global, and Silicon2 joined the trade delegation. Meanwhile, a separate two-day showcase titled “K-Beauty Glow Big in Brazil” ran alongside the summit to put beauty brands like Beauty of Joseon, d’Alba, Isntree, and Mixsoon before Brazilian retail buyers. 

Alongside the presidential roundtable, a second official channel was unfolding over the same period. On July 27, First Vice Minister Roh Yong-seok of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups met Brazil’s cosmetics association ABIHPEC and the e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, where they agreed to pursue joint research and marketing that pairs Amazon’s natural ingredients with South Korean cosmetic technology. According to Roh, such a partnership could pave the way for cosmetics becoming “the world’s number one export item,” provided the industry keeps strengthening and diversifying its markets.

For all of this forward-looking ambition, K-Beauty’s entanglement with geopolitics is nothing new. When Seoul agreed in July 2016 to deploy the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in order to counter North Korean missile threats, China retaliated by restricting tourism and banning imports of 19 Korean cosmetics, which dampened what had been K-Beauty’s dominant market. The industry has spent the years since deliberately reducing its China exposure, and AmorePacific, the country’s largest cosmetics company, has publicly committed to rebalancing its China-heavy portfolio toward the West. Brazil is the clearest measure of how far this diversification now reaches. It is Latin America’s largest consumer market and the world’s third-largest beauty market after the United States and China, but historically it had drawn little Korean investment, mostly due to distance.

The recent increase in attention could be explained by trade statistics. Korea’s cosmetics exports to Brazil jumped more than tenfold in five years, from $5.17 million in 2020 to $54.36 million in 2025, according to Korea Customs Service data. Meanwhile, in the first half of 2026, cosmetics exports to Latin America by Korean small and mid-sized companies rose 131.9 percent while exports to Brazil alone surged 237.4 percent,........

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