Photo: Tr3/Adobe Stock
During a state visit to Brazil in late July 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for a deeper partnership between Brazil and South Korea built on the following three pillars: commercial aircraft, critical minerals, and K-Beauty. While the first two are familiar agenda items across modern strategic partnerships, the third is decidedly not. Cosmetics rarely share space with jet manufacturing and rare earths, and their place on Lee’s diplomatic agenda reveals a lot about the Korean beauty industry’s growing role in Seoul’s foreign policy calculus.
Lee’s comment came at a Korea-Brazil business roundtable in São Paulo on July 28, where alongside delegations from companies like Samsung and HD Hyundai, the CEOs of K-Beauty titans AmorePacific Holdings, APR, Goodai Global, and Silicon2 joined the trade delegation. Meanwhile, a separate two-day showcase titled “K-Beauty Glow Big in Brazil” ran alongside the summit to put beauty brands like Beauty of Joseon, d’Alba, Isntree, and Mixsoon in front of Brazilian retail buyers.
Alongside the presidential roundtable, a second official channel was unfolding over the same period. On July 27, First Vice Minister Roh Yong-seok of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups met Brazil’s cosmetics association ABIHPEC and the e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, where they agreed to pursue joint research and marketing that pairs the Amazon’s natural ingredients with South Korean cosmetic technology. According to Roh, such a partnership could pave the way for cosmetics becoming “the world’s number one export item,” provided the industry keeps strengthening and diversifying its markets.
For all of this forward-looking ambition, K-Beauty’s entanglement with geopolitics is nothing new. When Seoul agreed in July 2016 to deploy the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in order to counter North Korean missile threats, China retaliated by restricting tourism and banning imports of 19 Korean cosmetics, which dampened what had been K-Beauty’s dominant market. The industry has spent the years since deliberately reducing its China exposure, and AmorePacific, the country’s largest cosmetics company, has publicly committed to rebalancing its China-heavy portfolio toward the West. Brazil is the clearest measure of how far this diversification now reaches. It is Latin America’s largest consumer market and the world’s third-largest beauty market after the United States and China, but historically it had drawn little Korean investment, mostly due to distance.
The recent increase in attention could be explained by trade statistics. Korea’s cosmetics exports to Brazil jumped more than tenfold in five years, from $5.17 million in 2020 to $54.36 million in 2025, according to Korea Customs Service data. Meanwhile in the first half of 2026, cosmetics exports to Latin America by Korean small and mid-sized companies rose 131.9 percent while exports to Brazil alone surged 237.4 percent, making it the standout market even within a booming region. As one Silcon2 official noted, exports to the region “have just crossed $200 million, and the market is growing fast.”
Developing this opportunity has not been left solely to the K-Beauty companies, as the South Korean state has built a track for growth that predates Lee’s July visit. During a February 2026 summit between Lee and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and Brazil’s health regulator ANVISA signed a revised memorandum of understanding extending their regulatory cooperation to cosmetics for the first time, covering areas like e-labeling that determine how easily Korean products clear the border. That same visit also carried a lighter kind of diplomacy, when Lula, who has publicly credited Korean cosmetics for his own good looks, went home from Seoul with skincare from LG H&H and AmorePacific. Meanwhile, Lee used the occasion to promise Brazilian consumers that K-Beauty “will become even more accessible.”
K-Beauty has long been filed under soft power, a pleasant byproduct of the same Korean wave that carried K-pop and K-dramas abroad. However, it has since become a serious economic engine in its own right—cosmetics generated a trade surplus of more than $10 billion in 2025, or roughly 12.9 percent of South Korea’s entire $78 billion surplus. The Brazil visit further demonstrates how the industry’s soft power is transforming into a commercial asset that the government now negotiates for and regulates around. K-Beauty has become an arena where the two forms of power feed into each other, where cultural influence built a demand that diplomacy is now converting into strategic and economic opportunities.
For the moment, however, the result of these dialogues resemble a buildup of momentum rather than any signed cosmetic deals. Lee and Lula agreed to push for a restart of stalled Korea-Mercosur trade talks with an eye on the December Mercosur summit, and Lula reportedly stated that the two countries “must double bilateral trade within two years.” Meanwhile, Seoul’s presidential policy chief, Kim Yong-beom, singled out cosmetics as an area where he expects substantial progress. None of this amounts to a treaty, but the overall direction is unmistakable.
Brazil is emblematic of what makes K-Beauty such a useful diplomatic instrument. The industry has proven adaptable, pivoting from a China dependency to U.S. and now Latin American markets in under a decade. It travels across very different consumer cultures, and its appeal has proven to have real staying power rather than fading with a single trend cycle. If the K-Beauty diplomatic experiment works anywhere, Brazil is where it will be proven, and Latin America is where the next chapter of Korean soft-power exports is most likely to be written.