Although still a relatively young brand (having just launched in 2017), Glow Recipe has since propelled its way to cult status and insta-stardom – the brand now has over 850,000 followers on Instagram. Founders Christine Chang and Sarah Lee pair powerful active ingredients with potent fruit extracts – think avocado and retinol, plum, hyaluronic acid and AHA’s – for synergistic cocktails that give rise to effective products with addictive, fruity fragrances.

Chang and Lee met one another while working together at L’Oréal in Korea before both coincidentally relocating to New York. The two continued to stay in touch and work in the beauty industry – Sarah remaining at L’Oréal with Christine moving to Kiehl’s. Bonding over their love for effective skincare with clean yet powerful ingredients, Sarah and Christine also found similarities in their holistic approach to skincare, connecting further and gathering inspiration through their shared Korean heritage and simple yet effective home beauty remedies.

Below, we speak to founders Christine Chang and Sarah Lee on the inspiration behind the brand, their holistic K-beauty philosophy, harnessing the power of superfruit extracts, and what they’re working on next.

What inspired you both to come together and establish Glow Recipe?

We were always talking about the latest trends or inspirations in Korean skincare, and we realised that we were both working on projects in our own individual departments on products inspired by K-beauty. We have actually worked in Korean offices in the beauty industry and have a pretty good network of people in the K-beauty space. We were very uniquely positioned, and we thought, “How amazing would it be if we joined forces and brought the latest K-beauty innovations to US consumers in real time, as opposed to rebranding it to them under another global company’s umbrella”. That way we can support and help smaller indie brands in Korea that had the potential to go global but didn’t have the resources or networks to do so.

In 2014, we quit our jobs and flew out to Korea to start scouting the best of K-beauty. At this time, it was to curate K-beauty innovations from different brands – if you think about a mini K-beauty Sephora – that was kind of the concept at the time. It was all about clean natural beauty skincare. 3 years later we launched Glow Recipe!

What traditional K-Beauty traits were important to maintain when presenting Glow Recipe to a Western market?

When we launched our Glow Recipe skincare brand in 2017, the initial inspiration was that we both grew up with a lot of different K-beauty rituals that we learnt from our mothers and grandmothers. We had always gone to public bathhouses and would do a lot of DIY’s with our mothers and grandmothers, whether it was cucumber slices on our face, or green tea bags with yoghurt or honey all mixed in. It was just always part of our upbringing, and in a way, heritage, where skincare was just a part of our lifestyle.

The initial inspiration for one of our OG products, the watermelon glow sleeping mask, was that our grandmothers used to rub watermelon rinds on our heat rashes, and we first hand saw such miraculous results – seeing how the skin was soothed and calmed and hydrated. We thought that it was a great opportunity for us to share what we knew was a special memory to us, but also part of a Korean beauty ritual. I think that type of inspiration is weaved into every single innovation that we create.

The bigger, traditional, K-beauty perspective that we wanted to bring with Glow Recipe as a brand is how everything is so holistic. I’ve always learned from my mom, if you take good care of your skin from an early age, and whenever and wherever possible, that it will reward and respect you back. I think that a preventative skincare approach is very much a Korean philosophy. In the Western market, it was always about seeing dramatic results and instant gratification – it was about repairing instead of preventing. We reinterpreted the Korean skincare philosophy and call it “Day by Day and Skin by Skin”. There is no right or wrong answer –  you may be born with one skin type, but your skin condition always changes. They are two very different things. To me, you can’t really box a person’s skin into one type.

All Glow Recipe products are gentle, even if they may have acids, or Vitamin C, or retinol. They’re all super gentle because we pack and pair them with very gentle and soothing botanical extracts that help to balance the product. And that’s very K-beauty too. It’s all about a balance.

If you had to choose, is there one product that you can’t live without and why?

Christine: The watermelon toner really balances hydration and is pore refining… The avocado eye cream is a close second. Especially in Asia, there’s a little bit of fear around retinol. We were really passionate about wanting to use this ingredient for the eye area, because it has really amazing benefits for the eye. It’ not just about smoothing fine lines and firming, it actually helps with dark circles because it helps with cell turnover and with milia. It just provides a myriad of benefits for the delicate eye area. Coming to a formulation that has encapsulation – the retinol is wrapped in a polysaccharide shell, that melts little by little over time, releasing these tiny microdoses throughout the night and feeding your skin just the right amount versus it all activating all at once on the skins surface, which is how traditional retinol works. Additionally, pairing it with a synergistic fruit like avocado, which is incredibly nourishing and serves as a buffer for the retinol. It’s so gentle but really effective.

Sarah: My personal favourite is the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask. It was just such an OG product that we put so much time and effort into. We were so nervous to launch it – we had over 1000 iterations of the formula, which is very rare for any product development. Because it was our very first product, we wanted to perfect it as much as possible. We have tried hundreds of products, and so we kind of wanted to make a clear point of difference from the point of looking at it – packaging is really important – to the sensorial experience when you first open a jar and you smell it and are just kind of immersed in this beautiful and divine watermelon scent, and then touching the formula and applying it. We wanted it to be icy cold, mimicking the cooling watermelon experience. After you leave it on overnight and you wash the next morning, your skin becomes baby soft. The whole skincare journey is what we think about, from A-Z. And of course results are so important. As entrepreneurs, the dream was to wake up with better skin, and we were inspired by K-beauty facials, where you get hydration, exfoliation, soothing and calming in one routine. So we said, “Can we combine everything into one jar?”

Is there an underrated ingredient that you wish more people knew about?

A few ingredients to mention are really fruit ingredients. We work in a way where it’s not just a sprinkle of fruit so that it smells good or that it’s a “fun concept”. We harness the fruits in a way where it is truly maximising the efficacy of each and every fruit, which is then deliberately paired with a key active that it works synergistically with. For example, plum extract, in our Plum Plump Hyaluronic Serum, has 5 different molecular weights of hyaluronic acid, while the plum works synergistically to support the AHA function in the product. It’s not just chosen because plum is hydrating in itself. There really is something more to that magical concoction. The ingredients we really want to educate our customers in globally are these amazing fruit extracts, paired with gentle actives. Our approach is all about gentle but potent. It’s really about the optimal blend of ingredients coming together.