One face, one formula: Inside Amorepacific's AI beauty lab

Amorepacific opened Amore Yongsan, a flagship store in Seoul where AI and robots create custom foundations, lip products, and hair care tailored to each customer. The store uses AI-based consultations and robotic arms to mix personalized shades from a pool of 335 options, attracting a near 50-50 split of Korean and foreign customers. The company aims for 15 trillion won in revenue by 2035 under chairman Suh Kyung-bae's vision of 'creating new beauty.'

At Amore Yongsan, AI and robots create custom foundations, lip products and hair care tailored to each customer Yongsan-gu has never been Seoul's beauty district, not like Seongsu or Myeong-dong, but it may be inching in that direction with Amorepacific's newest flagship store, Amore Yongsan, where beauty means one formula for one face. During The Korea Herald's visit to the store last week, a two-armed robot behind a glass wall labeled Hera Custom Match was at work inside its own sealed booth, selecting a bottle, carrying it to the pigment station and mixing, every so often breaking into a small dance mid-process. The finished bottle slides out through a slot at the front, ready for a customer who has just wrapped up a 15-minute, AI-based consultation with a beauty counselor. That consultation draws from a pool of 335 shades in all, cushion and foundation combined. "Our most popular service is definitely Hera Custom Match, where we measure your skin and match a product to your color," a store manager said. "Making something that's entirely yours is the value here.” A similar robotic arm, positioned across from the foundation-making robot, was handling lip cosmetics as the manager spoke. Several foreign visitors, unable to book the full consultation in advance, relied instead on a self-check AI kiosk to get matched to a foundation shade, with help from Korean staffers who speak multiple languages. Foreign customers are far from rare, the manager explained, especially those seeking customization services. "The ratio of Korean and foreign customers seems quite even, close to 50-50," the manager said. "But once it moves into actually making the product, it's about seven to three, with foreign customers making up the larger share." Many of them, she added, care just as much about the store's scalp diagnostic programs as they do about the custom-match counters. "One of the most popular things right now is Japanese customers looking for the Mise-en-Scene bespoke essence," the manager noted, referring to a hair service that follows the same logic as the Hera counters, offering 45 possible custom serum combinations. The store shifts into something closer to a research floor at City Lab, where researchers in white coats walk each visitor through a private consultation built on a proprietary AI scan mapping pores, wrinkles, pigmentation and barrier strength. A companion tool layers the research data using artificial intelligence to project how a visitor's skin might change over time. Down a corridor, the fragrance lab lets visitors trace how a finished scent came together, ingredient by ingredient. "It is an exhibit that shows not just the results but the research process itself," an Amorepacific official said. The official described Amore Yongsan as a place where visitors live out what the company calls "creating new beauty," a vision that traces back to chairman Suh Kyung-bae, who marked the company's 80th anniversary last year with a target of 15 trillion won $10 billion in revenue by 2035. "As a beauty creator that has pioneered and created new realms of beauty, we will present the world with a distinctive beauty that stems from the harmony of body and mind and transcends age and time," he said. minmin@heraldcorp.com