My introduction to South Korean skin care—the latest phenomenon sweeping online beauty forums, Amazon.com, and most recently, brick-and-mortar boutiques—came firsthand. It was my junior year of college, and I was living in Paris with a Korean roommate. In terms of beauty, we were diametrically opposed: Where I existed in the easy, low-maintenance, zero-to-one-step French skin-care camp, my roommate followed a strict, traditional Korean regimen of as many as ten serums, lotions, patches, and creams. Our respective shelves in the bathroom cabinet looked like two different planets—it was the first time I had ever looked at a shelf of beauty products and thought to myself, “What is all of this stuff?”

Fast-forward a few years and a few aggressive bouts with cystic acne, and I’ve been converted. The more I use the accessibly priced and adorably packaged K-beauty products, I realize that if skin care is considered a luxury in America, in Korea it’s a right, and they make it fun, which is why everyone is doing it.

Now my daily routine is feverishly long and constantly in flux, as I carefully add and subtract steps in pursuit of the next best thing—and it works. I’ve built an arsenal of facial mists, oils (both for cleansing and for moisturizing), face masks, sponges, serums, lotions, and masks for day, night, and a longer, more nourishing routine on the weekends. The trick, for me, has been figuring out which ingredients work best for my skin, and then finding the best products that contain those ingredients. Hyaluronic acid, for example, is like liquid gold for moisturizing, and charcoal reliably cleans out blackheads whenever they appear.

One of the best parts about the surge in the popularity of Korean beauty is that now these products are so accessible: If you don’t want to place orders from stores halfway around the world and wait weeks for things to arrive, it’s as easy as getting on the New York City subway. Chinatown and Koreatown (and, if you’re feeling ambitious, Flushing, Queens) contain treasure troves of shops selling things I never knew existed—there’s always something to discover. I was recently explaining this to Vogue.com’s resident beauty department, when Beauty Editor Mackenzie Wagoner asked to come along on a shopping excursion to some of my favorite stores. Which is how, on a recent Sunday, we found ourselves scouring shelves and filling our baskets with silicon lip masks, every kind of balm, and a super exfoliator composed almost entirely of water.