Glow Recipe Hits $300M by Seducing Gen-Z Women — and Their Little Sisters
By Kelli Luu | 23 Apr, 2025

Who needs saggy skin or wrinkles to spend on skincare? Certainly not the tween girls flocking to Sephora to snap up Glow Recipe products!

Thanks to pastel packaging and an ultra-clean vegan philosophy, a fruit-powered K-Beauty influenced skincare brand has become a sensation among young girls eager to splurge allowances and birthday money at Sephora. 

Glow Recipe was launched in 2017 by the seasoned beauty biz duo of Sarah Lee and Christine Chang.  Their new cosmetic line concept brought together the craze for all things Korean skincare with blind American trust in all things vegan, especially when presented in sunny fruit flavors. 

Securing Sephora distribution from the getgo was Glow Recipe’s first big break.  The next big break was Covid.  The sheer boredom of being pandemic prisoners gave young women the time to discover Glow Recipe.  Sales skyrocketed to $60 million in 2020, then quintuple to $300 million in 2023. 

The experience that Glow Recipe’s boss babes had acquired in the K-beauty e-commerce business was key to their strategy for growing the brand’s visibility.  They used social media to play up the youth-aesthetic packaging and highlight fruit-inspired skincare with emphasis on their vegan formulas.  It was all too much to resist for budding Gen-Z consumers — and their little sisters.

Tweens and even 10-year olds have been running to the stores to get their hands on trendy skincare products.  Apparently no responsible adult is pointing out that they don’t have any pores to tighten or wrinkles to firm.  Instead they’re totally under the thrall of favorite TikTokers and influencers showcasing Glow Recipe’s products in their everyday routines.  This has turned those cute pastel bottles into media of self-expression perhaps a couple of notches beyond dressing up dolls. 

Yet Glow Recipe isn’t a “cheap” brand, priced at the sweet spot of premium but within allowance and birthday budgets.  For example, the Fruit Babies kit mini set retailing for $38 gives girls their first introduction into the world of skincare and beauty. 

The Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dewy Flush serum launched in February quickly accumulated a 35,000-person waitlist, becoming Sephora’s most visited product up to that time. 

It’s clear that Lee and Chang have their fingers delicately but firmly on the pulse of young beauty enthusiasts. The selling points they tend to highlight for their products are hydration, skin protection, and of course, obtaining that natural glow — three benefits that grab the attention of even the youngest consumers. 

Glow Recipe’s secret?  Perhaps the knowledge that what they’re selling their 2 million Instagram followers isn’t serums and cleansers but an experience. A cheery, confidence-boosting experience fully in tune with aesthetic-driven marketing. 

Whether it’s a satisfying squeeze of a jelly cream or the way the bottles look on your bathroom shelf, Glow Recipe has managed to turn skincare into everyday luxury for young women glowing with pride in their skin — and eager to follow a recipe to keep it that way.