Two years in which Olive Young fell and Daiso rose

Ask in Korea where people buy cosmetics and the first name out is Olive Young. It is the drugstore chain run by the CJ group, it holds the loudest corners of Myeongdong and Hongdae, and it is in every guidebook.

It is also the only one of these five names that is clearly coming down.

Five places to buy, on one measuring stick

The figures are relative. Inside a single request the highest point is set to 100 and everything else is scaled against it. That is why the five names have to be collected together, and why no number in this table can be held up against a number from any other table in this article.

Coupang is far bigger than the rest. It is the general marketplace known for next-day delivery, and it carries not cosmetics but everything: groceries, detergent, electronics. A figure that size does not belong in the same conversation as the other four.

Of the remaining names, Daiso is the variety chain where nothing exceeds a fixed ceiling, Olive Young the health-and-beauty chain, Musinsa the largest domestic fashion platform and Ably a women's select app. Only two of the five set out to be cosmetics shops. They are here because these are the places where cosmetics actually get bought.

What is worth looking at is the three below it. Daiso 14.0, Olive Young 9.6, Musinsa 5.5. Two years ago Daiso stood at 10.1 and Olive Young at 8.1. The gap has widened.

The direction has split

Daiso's +22% is among the largest rises across the 59 words this site follows. Olive Young's −10% is the only double-digit fall among the retailers.

What happened at Daiso

Daiso started filling out its cosmetics shelves in earnest around 2022. As of January 2026 the beauty brands it carries are reported to number around 160, across around 1,700 items — 23 times the brands and 14 times the items of 2022.

What made that possible is that established manufacturers began making small Daiso-only lines. VT, Nature Republic and Holika Holika are among the names. Every product in the store has to come in at 5,000 won or less, so the volumes are cut and the boxes simplified until they fit the ceiling.

Which means that under the same brand name, what stands on a Daiso shelf is a different product from what stands in the ordinary store. A you-can-only-get-it-here situation was built without anyone setting out to build one.

Olive Young's fall has more than one explanation

This part has to be written carefully. Searches for Olive Young falling is not the same event as customers falling.

In our own count, 47 of the 59 words followed were lower than a year earlier. Coming down is the general condition; Olive Young did not fall in some special way. What is specific is that inside the same category of retailer, over the same period, Daiso went up 22%. Within a set that is falling as a whole, some things rose and some did not.

The 59 words are the list this site keeps under daily collection: retailers, garments, snacks, neighbourhoods. So 47 of 59 being down is a statement about our list, not about Korean search as a whole. What it is useful for is exactly this — a background rate to hold a single word against.

There is a second reason. A place you already know stops being searched. Olive Young is the best-known cosmetics retailer in the country and is entirely settled as a destination. The more settled the name, the fewer times it is typed into a box.

Between 1,000 won and 5,000 won

These two stores are not competing over one shelf. Olive Young's core sits in the 10,000 to 30,000 won band. Daiso's ceiling is 5,000 won. The price bands do not overlap.

That the figures crossed anyway is most likely because the manner of buying changed, not the shelf. From choosing carefully and buying one, to it being cheap enough to try several. The more often people try, the more often the name of the place they try in gets typed.

Who is looking this name up on NAVER

Separately from search volume, NAVER Shopping has a mechanism that returns the age composition of the people who searched a given word. Thirteen months were taken for 올리브영. A single month flips around from month to month, so the whole run is added together and the tail dropped to check the order does not change.

Under-30s come to 9.2%. How that is read matters. It is not Olive Young's customer base. NAVER's own user body leans towards the older brackets, so whichever word you take, the 40s and 50s come out thick. What can be read is not the absolute level but the order of words placed on the same stick.

Something can still be said. On NAVER, the act of searching for Olive Young is at present carried by people in their 40s and above. Younger users are not typing this name into the box — either they walk in without typing, or they look somewhere else. As an explanation for a 10% fall, that is a third candidate alongside the other two.

Type “new cosmetics” and what comes back is Daiso

One more stick, of a different kind. In the same week, new videos were collected on YouTube from nine entry words. The entry 화장품 신상 (new cosmetics) returned two, and both were reviews of new Daiso products.

다이소 8탄..기념, 신상 88개 팩폭리뷰⁉️ 역대급으로 다이소 거덜 내고 옴 (Daiso part 8: a no-mercy review of 88 new items. Cleaned the place out harder than ever)

YouTube, from the entry word 화장품 신상. 342,000 views over the most recent seven days

At 342,000 views it was the most-watched of the 25 videos gathered that week. The second, “new Daiso items, essentials for a trip to Japan,” had 36,000. In the same week, the entry word 올리브영 returned no videos at all.

The state of things is that typing “new cosmetics” brings back the Daiso shelf. It points the same way as 22% against −10% in the search figures. One week of observation is weak evidence on its own. What is worth noting is that two separate sticks point the same way.

Looking at what gets searched inside Daiso, 신상 (new items) and 추천 (recommendations) sit near the top. Not a particular product, but a look at what is new today.

The brands themselves are not yet followed

Everything above is about the names of retailers. The names of brands are not in it. How VT or Nature Republic moved over these two years is a different set of figures.

We are starting to follow brands that run a Daiso-only line against brands that do not. Whether putting product into the cheap band helps or hurts the brand's own name should show up in the search figures, and that is the next thing to publish.

From the desk. If you buy cosmetics in Seoul, these two are better treated not as competitors but as stores with different jobs.

Olive Young is for when you already know what you want. The brands are all there, there are testers, and the tax-refund paperwork can be done on the spot. Daiso is for when you do not know. Nothing is over 5,000 won, so there is no price to weigh, and the Daiso-only lines are not sold anywhere else. Getting it wrong costs small change.

In order: seeing Daiso first makes it easier to decide what to buy at Olive Young. Daiso is the one rising in the figures, but that is not a story about the cheap store winning. It is a story about the place where you try and the place where you decide coming apart.