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In Chicago, 'Korean Beauty Store' Means Two Different Things
Guides to Chicago's Korean beauty store scene point shoppers toward skincare boutiques, but the phrase also covers a much older, larger network: Korean-owned beauty supply stores built on the 1970s wig and hair-extension trade and sustained almost entirely by Black customers. Chicago's own business records show how little the two overlap.
Published
Type "Korean beauty store" into a search bar in most American cities and the results skew the same way: sheet masks, cushion compacts, snail mucin serums, the skincare-first retail wave that guides like the one making the rounds about Chicago are built to catalog. That reading isn't wrong. It's just half the category.
The other half is older, bigger by revenue, and has almost nothing to do with skincare. Since the 1970s, Korean immigrants have controlled a large share of the wig and hair extension trade in the United States, a dominance that grew out of Korean firms' hold on hair manufacturing and export. Sam Hwang, vice president of the National Federation of Beauty Suppliers, has put Korean American ownership of the country's beauty supply stores, the ones that sell weaves, wigs, and extensions, at roughly 70 percent. Those stores serve a customer base that is overwhelmingly Black: Nielsen data from 2018 tied more than 80 percent of ethnic hair and beauty aisle spending to Black consumers.
Two networks, one city
In Chicago, the two economies barely touch. Albany Park was the city's Korean American commercial core: 428 Korean-owned businesses there in 1991, according to figures reported by WBEZ's Curious City, dropping to 158 by 1997 and to about 50 by 2014, as the community moved to the suburbs. But the wig and beauty supply trade, what reporter Kwang Dong Jo called the "invisible economic backbone" of Korean Chicago, sat on the South Side, inside Black neighborhoods, not in Albany Park. "We don't usually live where we have businesses," Jo told the station. Northwestern historian Ji-Yeon Yuh's read on Albany Park's shrinking business count is plainer still: the city simply needs fewer beauty supply stores, dry cleaners, and nail salons than it once did.
Ownership of that older network is also turning over. Hwang expects Korean American ownership of beauty supply stores to fall under 30 percent within a decade. The Black Owned Beauty Supply Association counted about 3,000 Black-owned stores nationally as of 2018, roughly 150 more than the year before.
So a shopper chasing K-beauty in Chicago is following one thread of a two-thread business history, and the thread they're not shown is larger, older, and currently changing hands. The overlap in name is a coincidence of language, not of commerce, and it's worth knowing which store a phrase like "Korean beauty store" is actually pointing you toward.
Sources: WBEZ Curious City ยท WOSU Public Media