Can ‘London Partners’ give C-beauty its K-pop moment?

On London’s Great Portland Street this summer, a temporary retail space asked some of China’s best-known beauty brands to do something they rarely need to do at home: explain themselves from scratch. Proya, Winona, Pechoin, Perfect Diary and 10 other Chinese beauty and personal care brands were among the labels stocked at YanLab, the retail centerpiece of “London Partners,” a reality series co-produced by Hunan Satellite TV, Mango TV and Xiaomang, Mango TV’s e-commerce platform. Livestreaming mogul Li Jiaqi (李佳琦), known in English as Austin Li, served as the store’s brand director. His fellow partners were actresses Zhang Yuxi (张予曦) and Zhao Zhaoyi (赵昭仪), actor Yan An (颜安) and singers Shang Wenjie (尚雯婕) and Mika Hashizume. They fitted out the shop themselves before running it on camera. Li said in an interview with BeautyMatter that before opening, his team hired an outside agency to study how London shoppers find beauty products and what brings them back to buy again. The format extends an experiment that began last year with Paris Partners, which took 12 Chinese beauty brands to the French capital. The London store had 3.5 times the floor space of the Paris one, and its shelves went beyond beauty into personal care and lifestyle goods. The producers’ ambition grew with it: YanLab is now pitched as what Mango TV calls “a Chinese store that travels the globe.” C-beauty already had the industrial scale to make international expansion more than an aspirational talking point. China’s cosmetics exports reached 55.9 billion RMB ($7.8 billion) in 2025, and total cosmetics trade rose 2.7% to 171.6 billion RMB ($24 billion), according to figures released by the General Administration of Customs. At home, the industry’s all-channel transaction value passed 1.1 trillion RMB ($154 billion) for the first time, up 2.83%, according to the China Association of Fragrance Flavor and Cosmetic Industries. What remains less established is the international cultural value attached to those products. That makes the obvious comparison with K-beauty both tempting and misleading. K-beauty exported culture before beauty South Korea’s beauty industry shows what can happen when cosmetics expansion is accompanied by a much larger cultural phenomenon. Korean cosmetics exports climbed 11.8% to a record $11.4 billion in 2025, overtaking the US to make South Korea the world’s second-largest cosmetics exporter after France, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. Momentum has continued: provisional ministry figures put exports at a record $7 billion in the first half of 2026, up 27.3%. Yet treating K-pop as a marketing playbook obscures how long Korea’s entertainment industry took to build its overseas audience. Korean music, television, film and celebrities made Korean aesthetics and lifestyles familiar before many overseas consumers encountered Laneige, COSRX or Beauty of Joseon. By the time those brands arrived, the desire to take part in Korean culture already existed, and beauty products could ride it. “K-beauty’s global success was not driven by a single show or marketing campaign,” said Danni Liu, partner at iBLUE Group. “It benefited from a much broader cultural movement, with K-pop, K-dramas and South Korean celebrities creating genuine emotional connections with audiences around the world. That cultural influence eventually translated into consumer curiosity and demand for Korean beauty products.” Lisa Zheng, founder of boutique advisory C Cultural, said the difference runs deeper. K-pop exports emotionally accessible ideas — love, aspiration, fantasy — through entertainment that Western audiences actively choose to consume, she said. “London Partners,” by contrast, is primarily a Chinese entertainment property, and its story of Chinese brands succeeding overseas may resonate more strongly with viewers at home than with shoppers in Britain. Zheng said the risk is that brands change their geography without changing their cultural context. “To truly go global, cultural translation must come before transportation,” she said. She pointed to the show’s limited adaptation for foreign viewers, including the lack of English subtitles on some YouTube uploads, as evidence of a contradiction: a show about Chinese brands reaching Western consumers is not necessarily designed around Western consumers. Viewing figures point in the same direction. Mango TV’s episode page shows 160 million plays for the first episode of London Partners, while the show’s third full episode, uploaded to the official Hunan TV/Mango TV YouTube channel, had drawn 62,700 views. The platforms count views differently, so the figures are not directly comparable, but the gap illustrates how heavily the show’s audience remains concentrated in China rather than among the Western consumers the project ultimately hopes to reach. Expecting one entertainment franchise to build a Western audience for C-beauty asks too much. YanLab itself offered a more useful test: a relatively controlled place to find out which parts of C-beauty already made sense abroad — and which needed rewriting. What exactly should C-beauty export? Research shaped the assortment. Li said in the BeautyMatter interview that Paris shoppers had gravitated toward familiar efficacy ingredients such as retinol and niacinamide, while he believed London shoppers were more interested in botanical formulas, clean beauty, aromatherapy and a more inward-looking idea of well-being. That led YanLab to stock AromeManpo (馥郁满铺), an aromatherapy skincare brand built on essential oils, alongside more technology-led products such as Komfymed’s recombinant collagen skincare and Bixdo’s blue-light whitening electric toothbrush. For Zheng, the different elements of C-beauty should not be expected to play the same role abroad. “Eastern aesthetics” may be the most immediate door-opener, she said, because consumers recognize visual differences before they understand an unfamiliar ingredient or technology. Chinese botanical ingredients can then add depth, particularly when tied to a broader philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine and well-being. Biotechnology and product innovation are more complicated. Chinese brands have become highly proficient at spotting consumer frustrations quickly and engineering products around them. But an innovation built for Chinese skin and climate can become what Zheng called a “pseudo-demand” abroad if the underlying consumer problem does not exist there in the same form. Liu said product innovation and technology are C-beauty’s strongest advantages at scale, but cautioned that a formula that succeeds in China cannot be assumed to work everywhere. “European consumers have diverse skin types, climates, lifestyles, beauty routines and product expectations,” she said. “A product that performs exceptionally well in China may still need adjustments to succeed in Europe.” Manufacturing is not the weak point, said Lisa Shiqi Yu, founder and CEO of Meyris Marketing, a consultancy that helps Chinese brands adapt their identities for overseas markets. “The challenge has never really been the product itself,” she said. “China has a highly sophisticated supply chain, strong manufacturing capabilities and impressive innovation potential.” Desire is the harder part to build. “Having a great product and building a globally desirable brand are two very different things,” Yu said. Avoiding the ‘fridge magnet effect’ Chinese aesthetics provide an obvious point of difference on a European beauty shelf. London shoppers at YanLab were drawn to Chinese plant ingredients and to products with conspicuously Chinese design, Li said, pointing in particular to the bottles of Pechoin, a Shanghai skincare brand founded in 1931. Their design borrows from jade, a stone prized in China for millennia and associated with virtue and longevity, and Western skincare brands rarely use anything like it. Distinctiveness can stop at novelty, though. Shang, who served as YanLab’s operations director, said in the BeautyMatter interview that Chinese brands risk a “fridge magnet effect”: leaning on instantly recognizable cultural symbols that catch the eye and prompt curiosity but say little about the brand behind them. As “New Chinese Style” (新中式), a design trend that reworks traditional motifs in contemporary form, has grown at home, beauty brands have drawn heavily on jade, embroidery, lacquerware, traditional medicine, regional botanicals and historical motifs. Such references are recognizable at a glance overseas, but decoration alone does not tell a consumer why a serum should replace the serum already in her bathroom. Separating cultural differentiation from consumer relevance is Zheng’s answer. Chinese brands can keep an unmistakably Chinese identity while rebuilding how that identity is expressed around local habits, she said. She called the principle “Global Value, Local Expression.” Her test for whether that work has happened is considerably less glamorous than staging a London pop-up. “If you haven’t eaten dinner with your Western consumers, you haven’t gone global,” Zheng said. Who benefits from Charlotte Tilbury’s endorsement? Who benefits from Charlotte Tilbury’s endorsement? Charlotte Tilbury’s turn on “London Partners” seems at first to solve another problem facing unfamiliar Chinese brands: trust. The British makeup artist, founder of the beauty brand that bears her name, visited YanLab during filming and bought several products after trying them, then joined a YanLab pop-up event in Battersea. A globally recognized founder examining Chinese products give consumers an authority figure when they have no basis of their own for judging the brands. Tilbury’s role turns on what Liu said is the difference between “borrowed credibility and earned credibility.” An established figure can speed up an introduction, she said, but “cannot replace a strong product, clear brand identity or consistent consumer experience.” Given the show’s predominantly Chinese audience, Zheng said Tilbury may ultimately gain as much — or more — brand benefit from the exchange as the Chinese labels she is ostensibly helping. Tilbury appears before Chinese viewers as an experienced founder and makeup authority, demonstrating techniques and reinforcing the personality her company was built around. She has courted that audience before, appearing on Li’s livestream during a visit to Shanghai in April 2025. Seen that way, the endorsement runs in both directions. The Chinese brands gain proximity to an established Western authority, while Tilbury gains a prominent platform on a Chinese show built around one of the country’s most influential beauty personalities. Yu said the more valuable long-term partners may be cultural translators. “This is where I see the real opportunity for C-beauty: not simply borrowing credibility from established Western figures, but collaborating with cultural tastemakers who can translate Chinese beauty innovation into something Western consumers genuinely desire,” she said. She pointed to Nina Park, a New York-based Korean American makeup artist whose clients include Zoë Kravitz and Emma Stone, as someone who brings Asian beauty influences to Hollywood looks. C-beauty could look for a Chinese equivalent, Yu said: a tastemaker who understands the products and aesthetic codes coming out of China and can reinterpret them in a visual language that feels relevant and aspirational to Western consumers. Such figures could show how Chinese beauty techniques and textures fit into a global beauty vocabulary, which goes further than vouching for a product’s quality. From China speed to global brand value At home, Chinese brands work alongside sophisticated manufacturing clusters and fast-moving e-commerce platforms, selling to consumers who scrutinize ingredients and product claims online. Those conditions have trained companies to iterate quickly and respond to demand at a speed larger multinationals can struggle to match. That agility could become one of C-beauty’s strongest competitive advantages abroad, Zheng said, provided brands aim it at what foreign consumers want. The opportunity, she said, is to pair “China speed” with local needs: adjusting formulas, shades, formats and positioning faster once brands understand what a particular market wants. Commercially, Yu said, the question is straightforward: “Why should a Western consumer choose your brand over the countless alternatives already available, beyond functionality and price? What makes the brand culturally relevant, emotionally desirable and ultimately worth buying into?” “London Partners” cannot provide that answer for 14 brands at once, nor can reality television recreate the decades of Korean entertainment that helped make Korean beauty desirable overseas. What YanLab could do was expose the assumptions brands make when they leave China: which stories need too much explanation, which products solve recognizable problems, which Chinese references attract curiosity and which are strong enough to outlast it. Li said in the BeautyMatter interview that his personal hope was “to turn ‘Made in China’ into ‘Brand[ed] in China.’” China already has the factories and supply chains to put more beauty products on shelves around the world, and its technology is catching up. The harder part begins once they arrive: understanding consumers well enough that a shopper who stops to look at something distinctly Chinese also buys it.

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Can ‘London Partners’ give C-beauty its K-pop moment?