Glow Recipe Dew Drops
A $50,000 side project from two L'Oréal alumnae that grew into a $300 million skincare brand — built on a childhood memory of grandmothers rubbing watermelon rind on sunburn.
Glow Recipe's Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops are a lightweight, glow-boosting serum and one of the brand's signature "fruit-forward" skincare products. Glow Recipe has become one of the clearest K-beauty-to-mainstream success stories in the US market, going from a curated import shop to the #1 skincare brand at Sephora.
From a childhood memory to a Sephora exclusive
Co-founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang met while working at L'Oréal in Korea, and built Glow Recipe's origin story around a shared memory: both had grandmothers who rubbed fresh watermelon rind on sunburned skin during Korean summers. That memory became the basis for the brand's first hero product, the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask, which took over 1,024 formulation attempts to get right.
The mask launched in 2017 exclusive to Sephora with a 5,000-person waitlist, sold out in under four hours, and sold out again on its immediate restock — establishing the pattern of genuine, unmanufactured scarcity that's followed several of the brand's launches since.
How TikTok turned an existing product into a phenomenon
The Dew Drops didn't go viral on launch — the real spike came later, when beauty creator Stephanie Valentine (Glamzilla) posted an organic, unpaid TikTok using them as part of her routine, racking up nearly 2 million views. Days later, creator Mikayla Nogueira posted her own version, which hit 16 million views.
"As a beauty brand, once you go viral on TikTok, it immediately converts to sales like never before," co-founder Sarah Lee has said of the moment — and the brand's growth curve backs that up: revenue roughly tripled from $100 million in 2021 to over $300 million by 2023.
