Seoul's beauty shopping has a second stop. On September 11, Musinsa — South Korea's largest fashion platform — opened Musinsa Beauty in Hongdae, its first standalone beauty store, with around 870 brands and 12,000 products across four floors. Olive Young remains the dominant name in Korean beauty retail, but per BeautyMatter, competition is finally intensifying, and the new store rewards a different way of shopping.
This guide turns the store's layout into a plan. The short version: come to Hongdae to discover indie makeup and emerging brands, test products in person, and use the pharmacy floor if you shop by skin concern. Come to Olive Young for scale, skincare authority, and the widest brand coverage. Knowing which store does what saves a wasted afternoon in Seoul. And if you treat a store visit like a shows calendar — knowing what each venue stages, and why — the logic of Hongdae falls into place quickly.
What is Musinsa Beauty, and why does it matter?
Musinsa Beauty Hongdae spans four floors and roughly 1,262 square meters (4,130 square feet) in Seoul's arts district. It carries around 870 brands and 12,000 products. Of the roughly 600 beauty brands inside, close to 70% are indie — smaller labels with strong online traction but little physical distribution.
That ratio is the strategy. Musinsa is not building a smaller Olive Young. It is building a different gateway into K-beauty, one centered on emerging brands, color cosmetics, and discovery. The company built its fashion business the same way: give new labels visibility and infrastructure they could not build alone, then apply that playbook to a new category.
How should you plan a visit, floor by floor?
The two above-ground floors carry makeup, fragrances, skincare, hair and body products, and men's grooming. The first floor houses around 140 makeup brands alongside fragrance, colored contact lenses, and fashion-beauty collaboration spaces. Start there if your goal is color cosmetics — this is the store's clearest point of difference.
The second floor holds a Next Beauty Zone dedicated to emerging products, brands, and ingredients, plus a ranking section built from Musinsa's own online sales data. Check the ranking first if you want a fast read on what is actually selling, then work the Next Beauty Zone for names you have not seen yet. The basement is a pharmacy — more on that below.
A practical sequence, based on how the store is merchandised:
- Start on floor one with makeup and fragrance, where the assortment is widest.
- Move to the second-floor Next Beauty Zone for emerging brands and ingredients.
- Use the sales-data ranking section to separate trend from noise.
- Finish in the basement pharmacy if you have a specific skin or scalp concern.
When is the pharmacy floor the right stop?
The basement houses Beauty Onnuri Pharmacy, a roughly 176-square-meter beauty-focused pharmacy with approximately 270 brands and 2,000 high-performance products. Around 90% of its assortment is beauty, and at least two pharmacists are available for one-on-one consultations. For related coverage, see One Runway, Two Wardrobes: Why Houses Moved to Co-Ed Shows.
Products are merchandised by concern — scalp and hair, acne, troubled skin. If you already know your concern but not the product, this is the floor that answers it. A ranking zone can show what is trending; a pharmacist can explain what might suit you. That guidance layer is the store's second authority, beyond retail curation. It fits a market where ingredient literacy has risen and shoppers increasingly buy by concern and proof.
How does the fashion crossover change how you shop makeup?
Musinsa pairs makeup shades with different styles and looks, drawing on its fashion heritage. A lipstick shade is not merchandised as simply another shade — it can sit within an outfit, an aesthetic, or a look. For shoppers who already use fashion and beauty together, that framing is the point.
The practical takeaway: shop this store by look, not by category. Bring the outfit or the style you are building for, and let the fashion-beauty pairing spaces do the curation. Readers who think about presentation this way — how staging changes how a collection reads — will recognize the method; the same idea runs through how a presentation or runway show frames what you see.
Should you still go to Olive Young?
Yes, often. Olive Young ended 2025 with more than 1,380 stores across South Korea, 10 million monthly active website users, and KRW 5.83 trillion ($4.2 billion) in annual revenue. Its authority sits in skincare, wellness, and problem-solution categories. In 2025, 116 brands generated more than KRW 10 billion ($7.43 million) in annual sales through Olive Young — more than triple the number that crossed that threshold in 2020 — and six surpassed KRW 100 billion.
For travelers, the numbers are starker. Overseas visitors spent more than KRW 1 trillion at Olive Young stores in Korea between January and August 2026, up 47% year over year, accounting for around a third of offline sales. Olive Young is also exporting its curation through a K-Beauty Edit rollout into hundreds of Sephora stores in the US and two standalone California flagships. If you want the established names and the widest skincare coverage, Olive Young remains the near-obligatory stop.
What is the smartest way to use the store-to-online funnel?
The Hongdae store is part showroom, part discovery engine, part funnel back into e-commerce. You do not have to buy on site. Discover a brand in Hongdae, test the product, then buy later through the Musinsa website.
The evidence says this works. When Musinsa opened a beauty section in its Seongsu fashion megastore in April, the roughly 500 participating brands saw their average daily online transaction value rise by 35% during the first few weeks. So treat the store as marketing infrastructure: note what you test, then watch for it online. The same discipline applies to reading any staged retail or runway environment — know what the venue wants you to discover, and why. That is the core of How to Watch a Fashion Show Like an Industry Insider, and it transfers directly to a beauty floor built for discovery.
What to watch next
The evidence establishes two things: Musinsa has opened a credible second gateway built on indie discovery, makeup, and expert guidance, and Olive Young remains dominant while still growing fast. What remains unknown is whether Hongdae's discovery funnel converts at scale over time, and how Olive Young responds on its home turf. Watch both retailers' next moves in Seoul before drawing conclusions about who wins the K-beauty shopper.
Sources: beautymatter.com
