South Korea is ground zero for a lot of the hottest, and flat-out craziest, beauty trends of the past decade. There is a new one out there that its creators are hoping catches on in the US, which is a bit ironic considering that it’s made from the skin of dead people from the US.
According to a feature by Business Insider, American tissue banks have been shipping donated cadaver skin to South Korean biotech firms who are chopping up and processing this American skin to turn into injectable “skin boosters” like Re2O, an injectable and pricey treatment that turns your face dewy and smooth thanks to a puréed dead American.
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It sounds dystopian and rather gross, and it’s a little of both. See, when Americans check the donor box at the DMV thinking that they’re going to help someone with kidney failure, they still might, but also, their skin might get shipped across the Pacific to a country like South Korea that lacks enough domestic donors. So, companies like L&C Bio snatch up all the American tissue they can from supply hubs in places like San Antonio and Florida.
Re2O made a ton of money
Re2O made a ton of money in the first half of 2026 alone, raking in $17 million in sales. Broadly, skin-derived injectables are on track to hit $75 million in South Korean sales.
But what good is your product if you can’t sell it to Americans so you can unlock the achievement of selling their own dead skin back to them? like how Tyler Durden took pride in selling people’s liposuctioned fat back to them in a bar of soap? L&C Bio has signed a $60 million distribution deal to bring its human tissue-based beauty injectable into American med spas.
The company says Re2O is part of a broader family of products that don’t need FDA approval, but an FDA spokesperson told Business Insider that sometimes products that don’t actually meet that criteria still get sold. Who knows what will happen there.
It is all quite dystopian, especially if you are an organ donor and hope that, should you meet an untimely demise, your skin be used to help someone in desperate need of, say, a skin graft. The something so ignoble about the thought of your skin being turned into a smoothie that makes a rich person’s skin more supple.
