Laneige Brand Guidelines: Amorepacific’s 1994 Snow-Named Skincare Brand

A Seoul brand with a French name.

Laneige is a skincare and makeup brand of Amorepacific, the Seoul cosmetics group founded on 5 September 1945 as Pacific Chemical, according to English Wikipedia. The brand itself was launched in 1994: English Wikipedia gives that year, and Hankook Ilbo, writing in June 2026, described Laneige as a brand that “launched in 1994” and now has more than three decades of history. In 2019 The Korea Times reported that the company spoke of the brand’s “25 years of expertise,” which points to the same start.

Its name is French. English Wikipedia says it comes from “la neige,” meaning snow, and the brand writes it as a single word, styled LANEIGE on its websites. In Korean it is written 라네즈. Laneige has no separate founder: it was created inside the group, whose other brands include Sulwhasoo, Innisfree, Etude and Hera, English Wikipedia says.

The brand’s early products were moisturising skincare. The Korean pharmacy and cosmetics trade paper Yakup reported in December 2024 that Laneige launched the Water Sleeping Mask in 2002, an overnight cream that the paper credits with setting up a “sleeping beauty” category for the brand, and that the Lip Sleeping Mask followed in 2015. Modern Retail also dated the lip mask’s debut to 2015 in a report of November 2026. English Wikipedia lists the Water Bank skincare line, the BB Cushion foundation and two-tone lipsticks among the brand’s other main products, and says a men’s line, Laneige Homme, followed in 2007.

The brand describes its own range in terms of water and moisture, and its product names — Water Bank, Water Sleeping Mask — follow the same theme.

Airports, Sephora and a permanent store in Los Angeles.

Travel retail was one early route abroad. The Moodie Davitt Report, the travel-retail trade paper, reported in January 2012 that Amorepacific had entered the duty-free and travel-retail channel in February 2008 with Laneige, at the Nuance-Watson store in Terminal 3 of Singapore’s Changi Airport, and that the brand was listed on board Singapore Airlines from December 2008. As of January 2012, the paper said, Laneige was sold at 34 airport counters and on 17 airlines, through an agent based in Singapore.

North America followed in two attempts. The Korea Herald reported in September 2017 that Laneige had first gone on sale in the United States through Target in 2014 and pulled out in 2015; Sephora stores in Canada had carried it since September 2015. From September 2017 it was sold through Sephora in the United States as well, in 144 American stores and 74 Canadian ones at the start, under an exclusive arrangement. As of that date, the paper said, the brand was sold in 12 countries in Asia and North America.

Europe came through the same retailer. In April 2019, The Korea Times reported, Laneige partnered with Sephora in Europe, putting its products in 800 Sephora stores across 18 European countries, including France, Spain and Italy. By June 2026, Hankook Ilbo said, the brand was sold in 48 countries, including France, the United Kingdom, India and Japan.

In the United States the brand has moved from wholesale into its own retail space. Modern Retail reported in November 2026 that Laneige first took a month-long slot at the Grove shopping centre in Los Angeles in 2023, inside a shipping-container-like unit called “The Glass Box”; returned in 2024 with a three-month holiday pop-up; and then signed a long-term contract, making the Grove its first permanent location in the United States. In August 2026 it ran a “Wonder Lab” event with Sephora that travelled to seven American cities, the same report said.

The brand has also used celebrity ambassadors in its campaigns. English Wikipedia lists Korean actors among its models from the 1990s onward, and names the actor Sydney Sweeney, from January 2024, and the singer Jin, from September 2024, as global ambassadors.

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.

A new logo and monogram in 2019.

The brand’s visual identity was last overhauled in 2019. The Korea Times reported on 31 May 2019 that Laneige was undergoing a brand renewal “for the first time in five years,” with a new logo and monogram and a new concept, “Luminous Beauty,” tied to its moisturising range; the paper ran an image of the new logo and monogram supplied by Amorepacific. To mark the renewed Water Bank Essence, the company held a global conference in Shanghai for about 250 media guests, with a pop-up store aimed at Chinese customers. The renewal is the one documented point at which the brand’s mark changed; the details of its lettering and colours are not published, so the tones in this guide are our own.

Its stores have become a larger part of how the brand presents itself. On 5 June 2026 Laneige opened Laneige Seoul in Myeongdong, the shopping district in central Seoul, which Hankook Ilbo described as the brand’s first global flagship store. The paper reported that visitors could make a custom Lip Sleeping Mask by mixing flavours, from up to 45 combinations; order a personalised cushion foundation mixed by a machine from 150 sets of colour data, a service called Bespoke Neo; and receive skincare suggestions from an AI-based skin reading, called Bespoke Cream Skin. Modern Retail described the same Seoul store as reopened in summer 2026 after an 18-month renovation.

The Seoul concept then crossed the Pacific. In November 2026, Modern Retail reported, Laneige brought the mix-and-match Lip Sleeping Mask station to its store at the Grove in Los Angeles, the first time it had appeared in the United States, with flavours such as gummy bear and champagne, 3D-printed designs to personalise packs, and the same options extended to the Cream Skin Milky Toner and Neo Blurring Powder. The Los Angeles store is also used for creator meet-ups, master classes and as a meeting point for run and walk clubs, the trade site said.

For a design guide, Laneige shows how a brand created inside a large group can build a recognisable identity from a single image — snow, and the water behind it — and carry it through a logo renewal, retail partnerships and its own stores. Compare Amorepacific, the group that launched it, and Sephora, the retailer through which it reached North America and Europe. For this guide we use a glacier blue, a frost blue and a snow white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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