Behind Japan's Eyebrow Boom, a Quiet Korean Import Deal

JULIA IVY, the Tokyo company behind the eyebrow technique HBL, expects about 2.6 billion yen in revenue for its 2026 fiscal year, a pace it describes as roughly 200 percent of the year before, and now counts more than 13,000 salons in Japan offering the service. Founded by Hitomi Fukui in 2020, the company built that growth on a specific claim: that most Japanese eyebrow complaints come not from bone structure but from hair growing in a disorderly direction, corrected with a lamination style cream rather than tweezing or microblading.

A second brand, quietly attached

What that count leaves out is what else the company sells. Since June 2024, JULIA IVY has operated as the exclusive Japan distributor for TROIAREUKE, a skincare line owned by MK Universal Co., Ltd., a company based in Seoul's Gangseo district and represented there by Lee Mi kyung. TROIAREUKE positions itself around paid skin diagnostics and single customer formulation rather than shelf ready products, and states it operates in more than 5,200 salons and clinics across 47 countries, with the leading domestic share of Korea's esthetic salon channel. Those figures come from the brand's own materials; refulgo found no independent audit of either claim.

"When I met TROIAREUKE, I got goosebumps. This is precisely the brand everyone seeking skin confidence is looking for."

That is how Fukui described the brand in the distribution announcement, and the line is doing marketing work. But it also marks a business decision: a founder who built her name on a homegrown Japanese technique chose, for her second revenue line, to import a Korean formulator's protocol wholesale rather than develop or license a comparable product at home.

The pairing is worth noticing because of what it is not. It is not a joint formulation, and there is no evidence the two brands share research or ingredients. It is a distribution contract run through the same founder and, increasingly, the same physical salons, meaning a client who walks in for eyebrow correction may leave with a Korean skincare recommendation attached to a Japanese technique brand, sold by neither company's country of origin.

WWD Japan's own reporting on JULIA IVY stayed inside the eyebrow figures: revenue, salon count, growth rate. None of it mentioned TROIAREUKE, which JULIA IVY has been distributing for over a year and lists among its two core business lines on its own company page. The wire counted the salons that now offer HBL. It did not say how many of them also sell the Korean skincare brand sitting in JULIA IVY's other business line, and neither company has published that number.

Sources: JULIA IVY company profile · JULIA IVY distribution announcement, PR TIMES · Troiareuke / MK Universal Co., Ltd. company page