Olive Young Just Opened in California -- Here's What's in Its US Stores and Online Shop

Olive Young’s First US Store Opened in Pasadena

Olive Young opened its first US store on May 29, 2026, at 58 W Colorado Blvd in Pasadena, California – an 8,647-square-foot location near Colorado Boulevard and Fair Oaks Avenue, according to the company’s own launch announcement and local coverage of the opening [src-prnewswire-pasadena, src-abc7-pasadena]. It’s the first brick-and-mortar Olive Young store in the country, after the Korean health-and-beauty chain spent 2025 building out a US subsidiary and testing the market with pop-up activations.

For readers who haven’t encountered the chain: Olive Young is Korea’s dominant health-and-beauty retailer, the kind of store that anchors a shopping trip in Seoul’s Myeongdong or Gangnam the way a Sephora or an Ulta anchors a US mall. It opened its first store in Korea in December 1999 and, under CJ Group ownership, had grown to more than 1,300 stores across South Korea as of 2024 [src-wikipedia-oliveyoung].

Analysis: The Pasadena location matters less as a single store opening and more as a bet on a format. Olive Young in Korea isn’t a curated boutique – it’s closer to a drugstore that happens to stock the trend-forward end of Korean skincare and makeup, refreshed constantly and priced for repeat visits, not special-occasion splurges. Whether that “beauty drugstore” format translates to a single 8,647-square-foot store in a Southern California retail corridor, competing with Sephora and Ulta’s own established foot traffic, is the open question this expansion is actually testing.

What’s Actually Inside the Pasadena and Century City Stores

At launch, Olive Young’s US stores carried roughly 400 brands and 5,000 SKUs across skincare, makeup, hair care, wellness, and inner beauty – mixing K-beauty names like Anua, Biodance, MEDIHEAL, rom&nd, and Torriden with established global brands including CeraVe, Kiehl’s, Lancome, The Ordinary, and Urban Decay on the same shelves [src-prnewswire-pasadena, src-abc7-pasadena]. That mix – Korean trend brands sitting next to US skincare-aisle staples – is a deliberate departure from how the stores are merchandised back in Korea, where the assortment skews far more heavily toward domestic and other Asian brands.

The stores also carry over Olive Young’s in-store services: complimentary SKIN SCAN skin and scalp diagnostics, hands-on testing stations (a serum-and-essence bar and a toner-pad-and-suncare bar, stocked with swabs and sponges rather than just testers you dab with a finger), and expert-guided “Skincare Lessons” sessions branded as “THE BEAUTY LAB” [src-prnewswire-pasadena, src-prnewswire-centurycity, src-abc7-pasadena]. Gaeun Kwon, CEO of Olive Young USA, framed the debut this way: “Our U.S. debut marks an important step in bringing a more personalized and seamless beauty discovery experience to American consumers” [src-prnewswire-pasadena].

Olive Young opened a second US store on June 13, 2026, at Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles – a smaller, 2,694-square-foot location that leans even harder into skincare and derma care than Pasadena does [src-prnewswire-centurycity, src-koreajoongang-centurycity]. Jane Yang, Olive Young’s Head of Retail Operations, described the goal as building “a destination where customers can explore, test and discover products that fit their individual needs and routines” [src-prnewswire-centurycity].

Analysis: Pasadena and Century City read as two different bets on who the US customer actually is. Pasadena, per the company’s own siting rationale, was chosen for a younger, trend-forward, demographically mixed crowd; Century City – inside an upscale Westside mall minutes from Beverly Hills – is explicitly aimed at what Olive Young itself has described as more premium, highly engaged shoppers and international visitors. Running both formats at once, three weeks apart, is a faster and more deliberate rollout than a single flagship-and-wait approach, and it suggests Olive Young is trying to learn which US shopper the format actually works for before committing capital to a slower, more expensive market like the East Coast.

Shopping Olive Young Online in the US

Alongside the Pasadena opening, Olive Young launched a dedicated US online store at us.oliveyoung.com on May 29, 2026, with free shipping on orders over $35 and no additional import-duty or tariff charges for US customers [src-prnewswire-pasadena, src-oliveyoung-us-site, src-abc7-pasadena]. That’s a meaningfully different proposition from ordering through Olive Young’s older global cross-border site, which reportedly charged tariff-related fees and required a $60 order to unlock free shipping; the new US loyalty program has also been simplified to three tiers (Friend, Green, Gold) instead of the five tiers Korean shoppers see, and some Korean sunscreen formulations aren’t sold on the US site at all because they don’t match FDA sunscreen rules [src-thezoereport-pricing].

Analysis: For a US shopper who has been buying K-beauty through Amazon, YesStyle, Soko Glam, or Sephora’s own K-beauty shelf, the practical upgrade here isn’t selection – all of those already carry plenty of Korean skincare – it’s the tariff and shipping-cost removal specifically, since a US-warehoused, US-priced Olive Young order should land closer to sticker price than an order shipped cross-border from Korea ever could. The tradeoff worth knowing before you order: a few Korean-market products, sunscreens in particular, simply won’t show up on the US site because Korean and US sunscreen regulations classify and approve active ingredients differently – so a specific SPF formula you’ve seen recommended from the Korean market may not be something Olive Young’s US arm is able to sell you at all, regardless of price.

What Olive Young Has Said About What’s Next

Olive Young has said it plans to open more locations across California before expanding further across the United States [src-prnewswire-centurycity, src-cj-newsroom]; coverage of the rollout has specifically pointed to the East Coast, and Southern and Central US markets as the likely next targets, though the company’s own announcements have stayed general about exact cities and dates [src-globalcosmeticsnews-expansion]. Separately, Olive Young has also announced a partnership with Sephora to build dedicated K-beauty zones online and in stores, planned for fall 2026 across the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand [src-forbesvetted-launch].

CJ Group chairman Lee Jae-hyun has framed the US push in bigger terms than a single retail chain: he described the Pasadena opening as the group’s first step into the US market and part of a broader effort connecting Olive Young with CJ’s food brands (CJ CheilJedang, CJ Foodville) and its entertainment arm, CJ ENM, in the US [src-koreaherald-cjchair].

Analysis: It’s worth treating the Sephora partnership and the East Coast timeline as directional rather than locked in – both come from single reports rather than a dated, specific company announcement, and retail expansion plans of this kind slip or change scope often enough that we’re deliberately not restating them here as settled fact. What is confirmed, from Olive Young’s own releases, is narrower and more useful: two real stores are open in California today, the US online store is live now, and the company has publicly committed to more California locations before it goes anywhere else. If you’re outside California and can’t get to Pasadena or Century City, the online store – not a hypothetical future storefront – is the part of this story that’s actually usable today.

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This article describes publicly available information about Olive Young’s US store openings and online store as of July 2026. Store assortments, promotions, shipping thresholds, and expansion plans change; confirm current details directly on Olive Young’s US site or with the store before visiting.