The funny thing about life in Germany is that you often need someone from somewhere else to point out what’s special. For years, dm has been just another stop on a normal Tuesday: grab toothpaste, a €2 serum, maybe a pack of batteries you’ll lose immediately. Nothing you’d ever describe as exciting. And yet a Korean graduate student named Jihye Jung walked into a dm, filmed herself shopping, posted it online and turned German drugstores into a global obsession.

Her video surprised even dm. A simple shopping run racked up tens of thousands of likes in South Korea, where the reactions hovered somewhere between shock, admiration, and “How can everything be this cheap?” Suddenly Balea, Germany’s most no-frills brand, had the kind of cult status usually reserved for luxury K-beauty serums.

What’s happening here is something nobody predicted: D-Beauty. Not fancy German spa culture, not premium apotheke labels but the ordinary, practical, almost aggressively affordable drugstore aisle. The products Germans see as boring basics are being treated in South Korea like accessible luxury. A vitamin C serum for the price of a coffee? Magnesium tablets that don’t cost half a paycheck? A face cream that works and doesn’t require a PhD to understand? For many Koreans, whose beauty culture is built around performance, refinement, and presentation, the simplicity feels refreshing and the price tag is almost unbelievable.

This fascination didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2019, the Korean retail giant Lotte Group quietly started selling dm’s own brands, including Balea, in Korea. Back then it was around 40 products. Today it’s more than 100. And yet the real explosion only happened when influencers began sharing their own dm hauls online. That’s the part no marketing department can manufacture: social media turning German everyday items into soft-power exports. Migrants, students, travellers and people who live between cultures have become the bridge.

There’s another layer, too. South Korea’s beauty market is intensely competitive. Presentation matters. Good skin is a status symbol. High-quality supplements are part of daily routine. So when Korean shoppers discover German products that deliver results at a fraction of the price and come with the reputation of German quality, it hits a sweet spot: affordable luxury. A serum that costs €3 in Germany can feel like a small rebellion against overpriced K-beauty trends. And because the packaging is unpretentious, it avoids signalling “budget” while quietly delivering premium ingredients.

Meanwhile, in Germany, we’re experiencing the reverse phenomenon. Walk into a dm or Rossmann today and you’ll find expanding shelves of K-beauty: snail mucin, rice toners, fermented essences at the exact products Germans once flew to Seoul to get. Each country is in love with the other’s approach. Korea wants German minimalism and price transparency. Germany wants Korean innovation and sensory pleasure. You could call it globalisation, but it’s really a cultural exchange happening through moisturiser.
This mutual fascination also says something about how each culture sees itself. Germans tend to think of their everyday products as… well, everyday. Functional. Cheap. Reliable. Nothing you’d put on a bucket list. And yet South Korean tourists now arrive in Berlin with dm highlighted next to the Brandenburg Gate. They film shelves of Balea lotions the way others film Christmas markets. What feels ordinary to Germans becomes extraordinary through another cultural lens.

And that lens works both ways. Once you hear Koreans describe dm as a kind of paradise with full of variety, low prices, and trusted quality, you can’t unsee it. You start to notice the things that normally disappear into habit. The fact that you can buy a decent serum for €2.95. The fact that supplements don’t cost €40. The fact that “basic” doesn’t mean “bad.” Korean shoppers remind us that practicality can also be aspirational and that value, when done well, becomes its own form of status.
The Balea hype isn’t just about beauty. It’s about what happens when two cultures look at the same object and see something completely different. It’s about the power of social media to turn cross-cultural curiosity into real economic trends. And it’s a reminder that Germany’s influence doesn’t always look like engineering or politics. Sometimes it looks like a blue-and-white bottle of moisturiser sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for someone from Seoul to point a camera at it and say: “Guys… you won’t believe this.”