Hera Brand Guidelines: Amorepacific’s 1995 Seoul Luxury Makeup Brand

A skincare line that became a makeup brand.

Hera is a beauty brand of Amorepacific, the Seoul cosmetics group founded on 5 September 1945 as Pacific Chemical, according to English Wikipedia. The brand was born in 1995: Korean Wikipedia gives that year for its first product line, and the Japanese fashion site Fashionsnap gave the same year when the brand prepared its Japanese launch in 2023. It writes its name in capitals, HERA, and in Korean as 헤라.

It began with skin care rather than colour. Korean Wikipedia says the brand started with a skincare line in 1995, then extended into a men’s range, a body line in 1998, makeup in 1999 and a further skincare range in 2003. Today the same source describes Hera as a brand led by its makeup — cushions and lip products above all — and lists the Black Cushion, the UV Mist Cushion, the Sun Mate range, Sensual Intense and the Signia cream among its main products. The UV Mist Cushion was launched in 2012, Korean Wikipedia says, and The Korea Herald reported in August 2024 that the Black Cushion foundation made its debut in 2017.

Hera has no separate founder: it was created inside Amorepacific and belongs to the group, which is based in Seoul. In South Korea it has been sold mainly through department stores, Fashionsnap reported in 2023. Its skincare remains part of the range: SBS Biz reported in February 2026 that Hera had renewed its Signia skincare line around a white camellia ingredient, sold in department stores across Korea and on Amorepacific’s own online mall.

The Seoulista and Seoul Fashion Week.

Hera’s image is built on a city. Amorepacific’s own news pages describe the brand’s muse as the “Seoulista,” a figure meant to stand beside the Parisienne and the New Yorker as a modern type of the Seoul woman, under the brand line “Exceptional Beauty from SEOUL.” Fashionsnap summarised the brand’s positioning in 2023 as “Contemporary Seoul Beauty,” with the concept “Here Now Myself.” These are the brand’s own terms, given here as such.

Fashion gave that idea a public stage. The Star, the Malaysian newspaper, reported in March 2016 that Seoul Fashion Week had been renamed Hera Seoul Fashion Week under an official sponsorship agreement with Hera and Amorepacific, the first time in the event’s 15-year history that it had carried a sponsor’s name; 66 fashion brands took part in that edition, the paper said. Amorepacific dates the first Hera-sponsored season to the spring/summer 2016 shows, held from 15 to 21 October 2015 at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, and says Hera’s artists directed the backstage makeup for about 60 brands, alongside a #SEOULISTA photo event at its booth.

The brand also works with illustrators and designers on limited collections. In September 2016, by Amorepacific’s account, Hera launched an autumn collection with the French illustrator Eric Giriat at its boutique in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul, sold for one month in department-store counters.

Colour trends are part of the same story. The Korea Times reported in February 2019 that Hera had named “red vibe” its lip colour for that spring, developed with its researchers, makeup artists and brand managers and the French trend consultancy NellyRodi, alongside a “red sienna” and an orange; the shades went into three new lipstick lines, Sensual Intense Velvet, Sensual Tint and Rouge Holic Shine. The same report said Hera had appointed Jennie of the K-pop group BLACKPINK as its new model; by 2023 Fashionsnap described her as the brand’s global ambassador.

Design and documentation.

Korean beauty brands tend to present themselves through the groups that own them as much as through their own names. Two companies own many of the labels in this guide. Amorepacific, whose history page dates its founding company, Pacific Chemical, to 1945, lists brands including Sulwhasoo, Laneige and Innisfree on its corporate website. LG H&H owns lines such as The History of Whoo, Sum 37 and O HUI, according to the Korea Times in 2023. Other names covered here are run by separate companies, and each guide states its owner as dated sources give it.

The companies publish a good deal about themselves. Corporate history pages give launch years, founders and owners, and brand pages set out philosophies in the companies’ own words; those claims are attributed in each guide rather than repeated as fact. Where a launch date differs between a company and the press, both versions are given.

Much of the visual identity is set out in shops. Korean trade and daily press have reported flagship stores in detail: a lantern-themed building in Gangnam, a hanok store in Bukchon, a glass-walled visitor house among Jeju’s tea fields. Logo changes are reported as news too, with new wordmarks, colours and packaging announced to the press and rolled out across products, advertising and store interiors.

Export markets shape the story. Brands covered here have opened stores in China, Hong Kong, Australia and North America, and some later closed them; the Korea Herald, Korea Times and Korea JoongAng Daily have covered each move. Campaigns often pair a named range with a celebrity ambassador or a cultural partner, and each guide names those only as dated reports do.

From Seoul department stores to Tokyo and Bangkok.

For most of its history Hera stayed largely in Korea. Amorepacific said in July 2016 that the brand had held its China launch event in Beijing on 15 July 2016, with the actor Jun Ji-hyun.

Japan followed in 2023. Fashionsnap reported that Hera began selling in Japan on the @cosme SHOPPING online store on 19 July 2023, having previously been available in Japan through online marketplaces such as Rakuten, and that it started with about 60 products. The Asia Business Daily reported in September 2023 that Hera had run a pop-up store at Shibuya Scramble Square in Tokyo from 31 August and officially launched at @cosme’s shops in Tokyo and Osaka on 1 September, showing the Black Cushion and its Sensual Nude Balm and Sensual Nude Gloss; it had held an event for more than 300 distributors, media guests and influencers in July.

Thailand was next. The Korea Herald reported on 20 August 2024 that Hera had opened its first store in the country at Central Chidlom, a seven-storey department store in Bangkok, earlier that month, with an opening event for more than 200 guests and a pop-up in the same store. It had gone on sale through the Lazada online platform in July 2024, the paper said, and its range there included the Black Cushion foundation, the Silky Foundation and the Sensual Powder Matte lip tint.

Across these launches the brand has kept its name in capitals and its muse named after Seoul. Hera has not published its logo specification or brand colours, so the palette here is our own.

For a design guide, Hera shows how a brand can sell a city as much as a product — the Seoulista, the fashion week and the department-store counter — while its makeup carries the name abroad. Compare Amorepacific, the group behind it, and Laneige, another Amorepacific brand that sells through its own stores abroad. For this guide we use a boutique black, a lip red and a nude beige with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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