Biodance built its reputation on a single product: a bio-cellulose face mask that sells out on Amazon and now sits on shelves at Sephora. The story Beauty Selection tells about its own origin is just as tightly packaged. According to the company's Our Story page, founder Kim Mi-hwa suffered an accident that changed the course of her career. She spent about six months largely indoors, curtains drawn against sunlight, avoiding water on her skin while she tried treatment after treatment.
Beyond that company page, the details scatter. A PR Newswire release from August 2026 dates the accident to 2013. A 2026 ASOS interview piece describes it as a car accident that left facial burns. Neither the year nor the cause nor the severity appears in any Korean-language press report found during this reporting, including the Asia Business Daily profile that otherwise tracks Kim's career closely. The accident exists, as far as the public record shows, only inside Beauty Selection's own telling and the coverage that repeats it. That gap is worth asking Kim about directly: what happened, when, and how it connects to the mask she eventually built.
The word founder is accurate but incomplete. Biodance's site and a Columbia Business School event bio list Kim as Founder and Chief Product Officer of Beauty Selection, the mask's parent company. She didn't hold that title from the start. Asia Business Daily's February 2023 profile traces a one-person resale operation Kim ran beginning in early 2017, which she incorporated as Beauty Selection in January 2020. She served as CEO herself until September 2021, when she handed that title to Park Jae-bin and moved into a product and creative role. Park remains listed as Beauty Selection's CEO in the company's 2026 materials. Kim shapes the product and the brand. Someone else runs the company.
That handoff lines up with when the business actually took off. Asia Business Daily put Beauty Selection's revenue at about 32.8 billion won with 4.9 billion won in operating profit, likely for fiscal 2022. By fiscal 2024, according to KED Global's reporting on the company, revenue had reached roughly 135.7 billion won, with 26.8 billion won in operating profit and 18.1 billion won in net profit. The jump traces almost entirely to one item: the Bio-Collagen Real Deep Mask, which didn't become a major seller until late 2023. International sales account for around 80 percent of the business. The mask took the top spot in Amazon's US facial mask category in November 2023, more than a year before Sephora picked it up.
Kim's company has told the press it has sold anywhere from 150 million to 250 million sheets, with the number shifting depending on which release or interview you check. No outside audit backs any of those figures, so they read as directional marketing claims rather than verified sales counts. A steadier signal comes from Genic, one of the contract manufacturers that produces Biodance's masks. Investor research published by Douglas Research Insights shows Genic's sales grew 77.8 percent year over year in 2024 and 176.9 percent in the first half of 2025, growth tied to mask demand that Genic doesn't control and has no reason to inflate.
The mask's online popularity didn't happen on its own. House of Marketers, the agency behind the campaign, has published a case study describing how it recruited around 75 creators from dance and performance niches, not just the usual beauty influencer roster, to post about the product on TikTok. That choice helped the mask travel into audiences a standard beauty campaign wouldn't reach, and it's the kind of mechanism that gets lost once a product gets labeled viral after the fact. Loose association with the Hailey Bieber school of glass-skin mask culture follows Biodance in coverage, but no source confirms that Bieber or Kim Kardashian has worn or endorsed the product. The connection appears to be trend-adjacent, not documented.
Beauty Selection raised 11 billion won in a Series A round in 2022, backed by Altos Ventures and Red Badge Pacific, before the mask became the company's defining product. Kim has said she wants to build a house with multiple brands, the way Amorepacific operates, instead of running a single hit product indefinitely. That ambition puts her in company with Anua, Medicube, Round Lab, Tirtir, and SKIN1004, the cohort of independent Korean beauty brands that export analysts now credit with outpacing legacy players like Amorepacific and LG H&H abroad. Korea's contract manufacturing base, companies like Kolmar Korea and Cosmax that can produce for a brand with no factory of its own, is what makes that kind of overnight scale possible for a company that started as one person reselling products in 2017.
Market commentary from 2026 flags a harder question underneath the export numbers. Weak demand inside Korea is pushing many of these indie brands into the same overseas markets at the same time, and that crowding compresses margins even for brands posting strong headline growth. Beauty Selection's 2024 operating margin, near 20 percent, still outpaces most of its contract-manufacturing peers, but the same pressure that lifted it could flatten it if a dozen more mask brands chase the same Amazon category next year.
Kim no longer runs the company she started. She spent six months behind blackout curtains before any of this existed, according to the only account anyone has published. Between those two facts sits a nine-figure business built on a single sheet of bio-cellulose, and a founder who says the next chapter is a house of brands, not one mask with her name attached to the backstory.
