“Did you wear sunscreen today?” reads a smattering of blue bubble letters across the front window of Korean beauty store Senti Senti’s new location in Williamsburg, New York’s OG hipster neighborhood. The shop — founded in Chinatown in 2009 under the previous name OO35mm by Chinese American sisters Winnie and Sandy Zhong — has long been a go-to spot for local aficionados. More recently, though, consumers have been making their way to the store in droves.
“We always knew we wanted a second location, but the pandemic changed everything in enabling us to make that decision,” said Winnie. “In bringing self-care to the forefront of the internet, [the pandemic] also helped people find hobbies — and skin care was definitely one of them,” continued Winnie, who leads a 25-member team at Senti Senti’s 2,000-square-foot Williamsburg store. Among the roughly 165 brands lining the retailer’s shelves are K-beauty OGs such as Klairs and Amorepacific-owned , Innisfree and Aesutra — which have become all but synonymous with K-beauty’s initial, 2010s-era Stateside emergence — as well as a more nascent crop of burgeoning K-beauty indies, including Beauty of Joseon, Mixsoon, Anua, Round Lab, I’m From, Tocobo and more.
The likes of Beauty of Joseon and Round Lab have skyrocketed thanks to their hero , which cost less than $20 and feature heavier-duty than those that are FDA-approved in the U.S. It helps, too, that “a lot of Asian beauty brands excel at creating.