yeah I miss swatches and grwm reviews

im going to counter your take with : a lot of these brands aren't even making enough shades to fit the wide variety of natural skintones that even korean people have. korean people can be tan and have a skintone deeper than 23. bare minimum brands should have shade 25. second point : the kbeauty market actually does want to be on the radar of american consumers, because plenty of brands have their own us storefronts online (amuse, etude, missha, tonymoly, romand, dasique, tirtir) and if those brands want money from american consumers they need to do the bare minimum that other brands have to do when it comes to complexion products (and to be fair, a lot of these brands do have darker shades that are exclusive for their foreign markets). look at brands like cosrx, beauty of joseon, and some by mi; they have relatively low brand recognition in korea, with these brands just recently being launched in olive young, but an incredibly strong western following. the brands that are smart and investing in the us market will expand their shade range accordingly

People forget that the internet doesn't dictate what's actually popular in our countries. Like a product may be "viral" in a western country, but that doesn't mean the sales are high enough to warrant expanding shade ranges to cater to them. I'm in the US so I'm gonna use it as an example, since people here frequently complain about the lack of base shades. But if we were even in the top 5 biggest markets for AB products, we'd have exclusives from popular brands and we don't. The market here is not big enough for most brands to cater to. Half the people I know don't even trust buying AB products outside of Amazon because it's an asian company. Not to mention, I very rarely see an influencer who's in Korea complaining about shade ranges. It's just the trend to use a foundation 1-2 shades lighter. Just like it was the trend here to use one that was darker and it's currently the trend to fake tan. I don't think the market for exact shade matches is as high there as western people wanna believe. I get wanting to be able to use every product you're interested in, but I'm not gonna go to india and get pissy that they don't make the ghost white foundation I need. It just feels virtue signally and a bit entitled to think every single skintone in existence needs to be catered to if a brand exists and is technically in your reach.