Seoul - Running low on that moisturizer again? Time to stock up on cosmetics? If you are a woman and live in Japan, this may well mean a short trip to South Korea. For many Japanese it is not so much South Korea's rugged outdoors and beautiful landscapes, but happy bargain hunting that has them hopping a plane for the one-hour flight from Tokyo to Seoul.
A beauty fad and lots of bargains place South Korea as the best place for many Japanese women to shop for cosmetics and beauty products.
Thanks to the high value of the Japanese yen against the Korean won, Japanese customers can expect to pay between 30 per cent to 50 per cent less for cosmetics in Seoul compared with prices in Japan.
"I bought a dozen [tubs] of BB cream at a price of 15,000 won (11 US dollars) for each, which is almost 50 per cent cheaper than the price in Tokyo," said one Japanese shopper in Seoul.
BB cream is short for the popular Korean-made Blemish Blam brand, which was listed as Japan's seventh most popular consumer brand of 2008 by Japan's Nikkei Economic Daily newspaper. BB-maker Hanskin says it sold 2.6 billion yen worth of the cream after its Japan launch in April 2008.
In South Korea, a sales manager at a BB cream outlet at a downtown Seoul department store said Japanese women are the main customers for its products, of which about 30,000 dollars worth are sold every day.
Japanese customers are credited for a boom at both ends of the Korean cosmetics market.
In the market's privileged top segment, Japanese customers visiting South Korea are said to have shifted their favour from international brands to local brands such as Chinese-herb-embedded Sulwhasoo made by Amore Pacific, a major Korean cosmetics company.
French luxury cosmetics brand Chanel was recently forced to embarrassingly shut down seven outlets at Lotte Department Store, a South Korean retail chain, after it refused to accept the store's request to move its shop from its prime location to a corner as Chanel's sales were sliding.
Today Amore Pacific's new outlet occupies the spot held by Chanel for the past decades, a sign of the Korean brand's new status as the "queen of cosmetic brands."
In the low-price segment, Korean cosmetics Misha, The Face Shop and BB cream are the most popular brands for Japanese visitors.
Japanese cosmetics shoppers said the brands offered surprisingly low prices for all the frills - service by pretty salesgirls, generous gifts and decorations.
The cosmetics boom is often credited for the rise in Japanese visitors to South Korea at a time when Taiwan and Thailand are talking about fewer and fewer Japanese travellers visiting their lands.
The government-run Korea National Travel Organization (KNTO) says South Korea attracted 52 per cent more Japanese visitors in December 2008 from the year before.
