Dr. Jart+

The man behind the white-coated tubes trained as an architect, not a chemist. Chin Wook Lee approached cosmetics the way he might a building: design first, structure underneath. In 2003 he began tinkering with a skin-care-makeup hybrid he'd encountered in a Seoul clinic, a coverage balm aimed at women streamlining their routines as they entered the workforce. To turn a clinic curiosity into a product, he courted a doctor named Jung Sung-jae, who was testing treatments on patients with severe skin issues. The brand name is a small inside joke that stuck: 'Jart' fuses Jung's surname with 'art,' a nod to the founder's belief that clinical credibility and aesthetic polish should arrive together.

Lee spent roughly three years refining the line before it ever reached a clinic shelf, an unusually patient runway for a startup. Once it launched, he made a contrarian bet, pushing into the U.S. market at a moment when no other Korean house was, and choosing animation and what he calls 'witty communication' over the celebrity faces his rivals leaned on. Internally he ran what staff dubbed 'crazy meetings,' loose, unstructured sessions where employees pitched whatever obsessed them, on the theory that people are sharpest talking about something they're genuinely wild about.

That instinct produced the hits the catalog still rests on. The Cicapair tiger-grass treatment turned a green-to-corrective color shift into a viral demo, and the Ceramidin range built the brand's reputation for barrier repair, anchoring the body lotions, liquids, and masks shoppers buy on repeat. Lee likes to compare product-making to writing music, chasing 'classics' that hold up over decades rather than seasonal novelties. It's a fitting frame for a label that started as one architect's sketch of what skincare could look like if it took both halves of its name seriously.

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