CJ Olive Young beauty festival kicks off with record attendance

(Kim Hyo-hae)

South Korea’s largest cosmetics and beauty festival, ‘2025 Olive Young Festa,’ opened on Wednesday in Yongsan District’s Nodeul Island.

Running from May 21st to the 25th, 2025, the event has expanded to its largest scale, event organizer CJ Olive Young Corp. said. The festival is expected to double the turnout from previous editions with 30,000 visitors. Olive Young, which first introduced the beauty festa concept in Korea in 2019, aims to transform this festa into a true ‘festival that represents K-beauty’ that encompasses an enormous scale and diverse experiential content.

Ticket sales for ‘Olive Members,’ or Olive Young members, sold out immediately after opening in April. The 2025 event includes a record 108 participating brands across 84 booths that are organized into five key zones: skincare, makeup, personal care, healthy lifestyle and Luxe Edit.

The event’s most notable aspect is that it goes beyond a simple brand exhibition to enhance customer experience by deploying various immersive contents. The festival theme is ‘Treasure Island,’ so that visitors can enjoy K-beauty brands’ competitiveness as if they were searching for treasure.

“We prepared the ‘Festa’ as an event where brands and customers can come together by adding differentiated spaces and content alongside Olive Young’s unique brand experience to the Festa expertise that we have accumulated since 2019.” CJ Olive Young Head of Brand Creative Center Lee Eun-jung said. “Our goal is to provide a space where customers and brands can connect in a meaning way,” she added.

The event will thus be a place that organically connects the K-beauty industry ecosystem beyond a simple festival. It also strengthened its role as a place of exchange that connects the Korean and international markets by inviting key stakeholders in the K-beauty industry, including small and medium-sized brands, consumers, manufacturers, and overseas buyers.

‘Future Connect,’ a partner growth program that shares overseas expansion know-how with tenants, ‘Export Customs Clearance and Local Regulation Response Solutions’ that was held for around 200 brand company officials and ‘Global K-Beauty Trend Analysis’ were some of the various lecture at the festival that could lead to actual business results.

Additionally, around 400 people from major global distribution platforms located in areas including the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia were invited to experience the competitiveness of small and medium-sized brands that are now available at Olive Young and share insights on the K-Beauty industry as a whole.