Last April, beauty mogul Kylie Jenner posted a TikTok highlighting her favorite products from K-beauty label Medicube, after stopping by the brand’s LA Glowland pop-up. “I’m now obsessed with the Booster Pro,” she told her 59.7 million followers, in a video that has since racked up more than 1.6 million likes. After her visit, the pop-up had 5,000 visitors over a week.
Jenner’s is just one of the 670,000 posts under the #Medicube hashtag on TikTok, where creators and other high-profile fans — Hailey Bieber, Alix Earle, Molly-Mae Hague — showcase before and after results using the brand’s viral products, such as the Zero Pore Pads and Age-R devices, which have helped to position Medicube at the forefront of K-beauty’s latest resurgence.
During last year’s Amazon Prime Day alone, Medicube drove $22 million in sales; on Black Friday, it generated over $9 million across Amazon, TikTok Shop, and its own site. In October, it ranked number one in Ulta Beauty’s online skincare category and number three overall across online and in-store sales, capping off its expansion into more than 1,400 Ultra Beauty stores across the US.
“A lot of products that already exist in the UK and the US markets tend to focus on more generic skin concerns, like moisturizing or anti-aging. However, a lot of our products focus on very specific skincare needs and cater to specific ingredients,” says founder and CEO of Medicube’s parent company APR Kim Byung-hoon, speaking to Vogue Business on Zoom from Seoul. “Because of this very targeted ingredient pairing, we felt that the products really resonated with the consumers.”
Medicube was founded in Seoul in 2017 under APR Corp — a beauty-tech group established in 2014, which houses brands including AprilSkin, Forment, and Glam.D — Medicube started out as a dermatology-led skincare label before evolving into a device-and-skincare hybrid brand. It began to hit international virality around 2022, as TikTok’s appetite for at-home beauty tech accelerated and creators began documenting visible, real-time results from its cult products.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, APR reported consolidated revenues of approximately $440 million, up 124% year-on-year. Overseas revenue rose 203% to roughly $362 million, increasing its share of total sales from 58% to 87%. For the full year, APR reported total revenues of approximately $1.2 billion, of which Medicube accounted for roughly $1.1 billion, meaning the brand constitutes the vast majority of the group’s overall business and serves as its primary growth engine.
K-beauty — which first surged a decade ago, before reaching market saturation — has enjoyed a second coming over the last two years, as new players like Medicube enter the fray. Suddenly, K-beauty labels are flooding feeds and retail shelves, with Western legacy conglomerates and indie upstarts racing to compete. Using similar active ingredients, Medicube has managed to cut through the noise by anchoring itself in problem-solution alignment — first with its Red line targeting acne-prone skin, and later with its tech-driven Age-R devices, which moved the needle from topical treatments to beauty hardware. Rather than merely riding waves of virality, the brand has focused on engineering them, pairing clinical positioning with high-ticket beauty tech and an aggressive digital distribution strategy designed to convert attention into sustained scale.
But as K-beauty’s resurgence intensifies, and competitors increasingly move into devices and clinical claims, the brand will need to grapple with its sustaining innovation and premium positioning in a market where trends — and loyalties — move at algorithmic speed.
Dermatology first, trend second
While much of K-beauty’s second wave in the West has been propelled by dewy “glass skin” aesthetics and slugging, Medicube has carved out a path of its own. Instead of jumping on each viral trend and marketing message, the brand has built momentum around highly specific, problem-solution products, most notably its Zero Pore Pads, a textured, dual-sided exfoliating pad pre-soaked in pore-refining actives, as well as its Collagen Night Wrapping Mask, designed to seal ingredients overnight for a visible firmness boost. The through line is not trend participation, but targeted outcomes: clear concerns, measurable results, and repeatable routines that are easily shareable online.
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