Into You: How a Lip Mud Pioneer Is Rewriting the Rules of Color Cosmetics Globally

Most beauty brands spend years trying to carve out a niche within an existing product category. Into You did something rarer: it invented one. When the Shanghai-based brand launched its first lip mud in 2020, it introduced a texture that sat between liquid lipstick and lip tint, delivering the coveted velvet-matte finish that millions of Chinese consumers wanted but could not find in any existing product. Within months, "lip mud" was not just a product name. It was an entirely new category, with sales on Taobao and Tmall reaching 230 million yuan (approximately US$33 million) and a staggering 3,141 percent year-on-year increase in its first full year on the platform.

Five years later, Into You is available in over 40 countries, has amassed more than 80 million fans, and offers over 300 shades across 22 product collections. The brand has secured backing from investors including Fosun RZ Capital and GSR Ventures, appointed K-pop star Song Yuqi of (G)I-DLE as its global brand ambassador, and landed on shelves from Tokyo to Southeast Asia. But the question that matters most for Into You's next chapter is not whether lip mud was a good idea. It is whether a single product innovation, born from a very specific gap in the Chinese market, can become the foundation of a global color cosmetics brand.

Into You's signature lip mud range, the product that created an entirely new texture category in Chinese color cosmetics (Source: Into You Official)

The Texture Gap That Created a Category

Into You's origin story is, at its core, a product development insight. Founder Wen Chong, who spent eight years at Alibaba before launching the brand on December 31, 2019, noticed a persistent frustration among Chinese beauty consumers. They wanted the look of a matte lip, but the products available to achieve it were punishingly dry. Liquid lipsticks cracked. Matte bullet lipsticks tugged. Lip tints offered the wrong finish entirely. The market had plenty of lip color options, but none that nailed the specific combination of velvet-matte appearance, comfortable wear, and smooth application.

Wen's solution was what the brand calls "lip mud," a formulation with a clay-like texture that glides on smoothly, sets to a soft matte, and feels lightweight on the lips. The name itself was a stroke of marketing clarity. Rather than positioning the product as a better version of an existing format, Into You framed it as something entirely new. This was not a lip gloss or a liquid lipstick. It was lip mud. The distinction mattered because it gave consumers a reason to try something they could not mentally file alongside products they had already used and potentially rejected.

The timing was equally important. Into You officially opened its Tmall store in May 2020, just as China's livestream commerce boom was accelerating. The lip mud's unusual texture made it inherently demonstrable. Viewers could watch a host apply it, see the matte finish develop in real time, and understand immediately why it was different. Within its first year on Alibaba, lip mud category sales surged to 230 million yuan (approximately US$33 million) with over 3,000 percent growth, attracting over 530,000 followers and partnerships with nearly 1,000 Taobao retailers. By Double 11 in 2022, Into You's total GMV hit 165 million yuan (approximately US$23 million), with the brand ranking first in the lip gloss category and acquiring over 500,000 new members.

Building Beyond the Into You Lip Mud Moat

Category creators face a paradox: the very innovation that makes them famous can also become a ceiling. If Into You is "the lip mud brand," what happens when competitors replicate the texture and undercut the price? This is not a hypothetical concern. Within a year of lip mud's breakout success, brands including Perfect Diary, Yntoor, and VNK all launched their own versions. International brands, which have historically dominated the premium lipstick segment in China, began paying closer attention to the sub-category where Chinese brands were clearly winning.

Into You's response has been to iterate relentlessly on the format it created. The brand now offers multiple lip mud variants: the original Matte Lip Mud, the Airy Lip Mud (lighter, more sheer), the Canned Lip Mud (a pot format with higher pigmentation for full coverage), and the Barreled Lip Mud. Each variant targets a different use case and preference, from everyday natural looks to bold editorial statements. The product line has expanded to over 300 shades, giving Into You one of the broadest color ranges of any Chinese color cosmetics brand.

Beyond lips, Into You has extended into eye shadow, blush, and eyeliner, though lip products remain the core. The brand's IP collaborations have been particularly effective at keeping it culturally relevant. A partnership with POP MART incorporated characters like Labubu, Crybaby, and Dimoo into limited-edition packaging. A Van Gogh series brought art-inspired aesthetics to the lip mud format. These collaborations are not just marketing exercises. They serve a strategic function: turning a functional beauty product into a collectible, which drives repeat purchases and social media sharing.

Into You x POP MART collaboration featuring Labubu character on limited-edition lip mud packaging (Source: Into You Official)

From Tmall to 40 Countries: Into You Lip Mud's Global Playbook

Into You's international expansion follows a pattern increasingly common among Chinese beauty brands: Southeast Asia first, then Japan, then the broader global market through DTC e-commerce. The brand is currently available in over 40 countries, primarily through its official website, Amazon, Shopee, and Lazada. In Japan, Into You products appear in physical retail through MoldBreaking, a brand management agency that has created dedicated "Chinese style zones" in Japanese makeup shops, positioning C-beauty products alongside established Korean and Japanese brands.

The Southeast Asian market is a natural starting point. The region's young, social-media-savvy consumers are open to experimenting with new brands, and the large overseas Chinese population provides an initial base of customers already familiar with the brand from Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Price sensitivity in the region also works in Into You's favor. At roughly US$8 to US$15 per product, Into You sits in a sweet spot that feels premium relative to local drugstore brands but remains accessible compared to Korean or Western imports.

Japan presents a more interesting test case. The Japanese beauty market is notoriously discerning, with consumers who prioritize texture and finish above almost everything else. In theory, this should work in Into You's favor, since texture innovation is literally the brand's founding premise. And there is evidence that it does: Chinese beauty brands including Into You have been gaining traction in Japanese retail, particularly among younger consumers attracted to the aesthetic sensibility of C-beauty packaging and the novelty of formats like lip mud. But Japan is also a market where brand trust builds slowly, and where domestic brands like rom&nd's Japanese lines and Canmake have deep loyalty among the budget-conscious segment Into You would need to win.

The Western market, particularly the United States and Europe, represents the longest-term bet. Into You has an Amazon storefront and ships internationally through its DTC site, but has not yet made the kind of retail push that would put it in front of mainstream Western consumers. This is where the comparison with affordable Western brands becomes relevant. In the US, e.l.f. Cosmetics has demonstrated that a brand can win massive market share through aggressive pricing, TikTok virality, and a relentless pace of product launches. NYX, backed by L'Oreal's distribution muscle, owns significant shelf space in mass retail. For Into You to compete in this arena, lip mud's textural novelty alone may not be enough. The brand will need a distribution strategy, a localized content approach, and, most critically, a value proposition that resonates with consumers who have never heard of the category it invented.

Into You's official international website serves as the brand's primary DTC channel for global consumers (Source: Into You Cosmetics)

What Into You Can Learn from rom&nd and e.l.f.

The most instructive comparisons for Into You are not Chinese luxury brands like Mao Geping, which operates in a completely different price tier and relies on cultural prestige as its primary differentiator. Into You's real peer group consists of affordable, social-media-native color cosmetics brands that have successfully expanded beyond their home markets.

rom&nd, the Korean brand founded by beauty influencer Saeron Min, offers a compelling parallel. Like Into You, rom&nd built its reputation on lip products, particularly its Juicy Lasting Tint line. Like Into You, it targeted young consumers through social media and influencer marketing. And like Into You, it priced its products in the accessible range. rom&nd's expansion into Japan and Southeast Asia has been notably successful, with the brand becoming one of the top-selling K-beauty lip brands on platforms like Qoo10 and Shopee. The lesson for Into You: in markets outside China, the competition is not just other C-beauty brands. It is the entire K-beauty ecosystem, which has a decade-long head start in building trust with Asian beauty consumers outside China.

e.l.f. Cosmetics provides a different kind of lesson. The American brand's explosive growth over the past three years was driven not by product innovation (though its formulations are well-regarded) but by a combination of radical affordability, TikTok-first marketing, and speed. e.l.f. releases new products at a pace that most competitors cannot match, and it has turned its "dupe" positioning, offering products that perform comparably to luxury alternatives at a fraction of the price, into a cultural identity. For Into You, the e.l.f. example suggests that entering the US market successfully requires more than good products. It requires a brand narrative that American consumers can immediately understand and rally around.

Can a Category Creator Sustain Its Global Edge?

Into You's biggest strategic asset is also its biggest vulnerability. Being the brand that invented lip mud gives it credibility and first-mover recognition. But categories, once proven, attract fast followers. In China, this dynamic has already played out. Major brands and white-label manufacturers have all produced lip mud products, many at lower price points. Internationally, the same pattern will likely repeat as the texture format gains recognition.

The brand's approach to this challenge, so far, has been smart: constant iteration on the core format (each new variant addresses a specific consumer need), IP collaborations that add cultural dimension to a functional product, and a celebrity partnership with Song Yuqi that bridges Chinese and Southeast Asian markets. The vegan and cruelty-free positioning also aligns well with the values that matter most in Western markets.

But several questions remain open. Into You's Series A funding of approximately US$4.64 million, while meaningful, is modest compared to the war chests that e.l.f. and even some K-beauty brands deploy for international expansion. The brand has not yet established a strong offline retail presence outside Japan. And the "lip mud" concept, while viral in East Asia, is still largely unknown to Western consumers, meaning the brand would need to spend significant resources on category education before it can sell the product itself.

The broader context is encouraging. China's cosmetics exports reached US$3.99 billion in the first 11 months of 2025, an 8.7 percent year-on-year increase, and C-beauty as a whole is gaining credibility internationally. Brands like Flower Knows have shown that Chinese color cosmetics can resonate with global consumers when the brand story is right. Florasis has proven that offline retail expansion in markets like Japan and Europe is possible, even if progress is gradual.

Into You's path forward likely depends on three things. First, whether the brand can scale its DTC infrastructure to serve Western markets efficiently, including faster shipping, localized content, and customer service. Second, whether it can secure retail partnerships that give it physical visibility in key markets. Third, and most fundamentally, whether it can evolve from "the lip mud brand" into a full-spectrum color cosmetics brand with a global identity, without losing the product-led focus that made it successful in the first place.

Into You did not just launch a product. It created a language for a texture that consumers did not know they wanted. The question now is whether that language can translate.

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Double V Consulting helps international brands navigate the Chinese market and supports Chinese brands looking to expand globally, from market research and brand strategy to social media content and KOL campaigns. Talk to our team.