The allure of Korean beauty culture
From the table of a Korean plastic surgery clinic, a book reflection of sorts
Few developments in the beauty industry feel groundbreaking to me these days. Despite a new trend going viral once a month and top beauty brands dropping new products just as often, the consumerism of it all isn’t surprising. Everyone promises more beauty, more youth, more happiness. Everyone is eager to perform transparency by listing off the work they’ve had done or taking their followers into the procedure room with them, camera rolling as a nurse sticks delicate needles into their face. Even the justifications we make for engaging in beauty culture and the subsequent backlash from those who don’t feel tedious.
One shiny corner of beauty culture continues to fascinate me, though: Korean beauty, both with its innovation and its cult-like following, growing daily as Western society readily embraces Hallyu, or the strategic “Korean wave” that the South Korean government has heavily invested in to assert the country’s global influence.
K-beauty’s steady increase in popularity has no shortage of think pieces and articles dissecting it, but Elise Hu’s book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-beauty Capital, was the first piece of writing I’d read that attempted to look at K-beauty’s implications for the rest of the world, always a few steps behind Korea, technologically speaking. Hu positions herself as a woman who is not immune to the pressures of the beauty industry and does not necessarily view herself as too enlightened to partake in the ritual, however flawed.
Many beauty culture examinations on the internet come from white women who, like me, seemingly fit society’s beauty standards pretty well. Easy, then, to transcend the base urges of superficiality. Convenient, once you’ve lived in the relative comfort of acceptance, to turn your critique outward.
But it’s always been easier to reject the pull of consumerism when it isn’t marketed directly at us. It feels impossible to opt out of a system that punishes us for not partaking. While we should reflect on our participation, shame is not a particularly effective motivator.
None of this shame or knowledge has cured me entirely of my insecurities. Being told I’m superficial has not changed what I see in the mirror or the ways in which I fantasize about looking different.
I’m still committed to wearing sunscreen daily (Korean only, please). I am still a VIB Rouge member at Sephora, meaning I somehow spend $1,000 there every year, which doesn’t even include Korean products not sold by U.S. retailers that I have to place orders for elsewhere. And last year, not too long after I turned 31, I got Botox for the first time. And the second, and the third. I get what is grotesquely marketed as “baby Botox” — a smaller dose of the neurotoxin — injected into my forehead every three to four months. I’m newly 33 now, and what started as an experiment in curiosity has become a normal part of my beauty routine. Clearly, I am not above wanting to fit in and cannot resist my little monkey dances as if I were auditioning for Club Beautiful.
I knew I’d get my face injected and scrubbed off in South Korea even as I planned my trip and looked for reasons not to. Little could deter me, though after finishing Flawless earlier in the year, I tried to question my vanity. I felt strongly, if briefly, that I should avoid caving to the procedures, serums, and lasers. Ultimately, I caved anyway. I thought, why not get my regular Botox where it’s cheap? Why not see if my painful cystic acne can be miraculously healed? Why not buy my favorite skincare products where they’re cheaper? Why not, why not, why not.
In the five short days that I was in Korea in September, I received a scalp treatment, a facial, microneedling, the Korean brand of Botox, a fat-dissolving shot in my double chin, a laser treatment whose name sounds like it could be in one of those drug commercials that spend 60 seconds rattling off side effects.
Immediately upon arrival in the country, Korean beauty standards were obvious. On our Asiana Airlines flight from Osaka to Seoul, the flight attendants were beautiful and poreless, not a hair out of place. They looked like they’d never hunched over a tray table and housed a plastic tray of bibimbap, as I did, makeup-free and unwashed in unflattering athleisure. Soon, I thought. Soon, I’ll be like them.
First, my sister — whom I am relieved to have shared this experience with — and I got a high-tech facial where they used a macro lens camera to take up-close pictures of our skin and identify “problem areas,” ending with a humbling diagnosis of our faces’ age (mine was 38, so six years older than my actual body; I have acne and “bad skin,” but even still, I’d love to know what you have to do to get your age).
We were scolded again later in the week for all of the deeper problem areas on our faces at a plastic surgery clinic in Gangnam where the doctor straightforwardly pointed out his suggestions for our faces on a paper diagram. “I wasn’t self-conscious about my necklines before but I certainly am now,” my sister said as we laughed about the experience afterward.
Though the doctor said we were far from “needing” face lifts — 20 years, to be precise — he suggested just about every other treatment the clinic offered, from microneedling to lasers to injections of collagen-stimulating chemicals. He never called us ugly, nor did he give us a hard, fear-mongering sell, but he was matter-of-fact about a universal truth: We are aging, and we are aging while white. If we don’t want to look like we are, we’ll need to regularly shell out thousands of dollars.
This standard holds steady across most cultures. Women are urged to cling to their youth. Thanks to social media, where people like me are normalizing beauty procedures that range from as minimally invasive as Botox to full-blown, under-the-knife plastic surgery, the age at which women feel the pressure to remain firmly in girlhood is becoming younger and younger.
The irony of this demand that women undergo procedures and buy products to remain youthful is that it often makes us look older. “Preventative” Botox is one of the biggest offenders. We’re chasing youth before it’s ever even escaped us.
The word “preventative” calls to mind health and wellness, as if neurotoxins were as natural to a routine as eating vegetables or exercising. It’s necessary to conjure up this image of health to even sell the product in the first place. “Botox just because” isn’t going to convince as many young, wrinkle-free people to shell out thousands of dollars a year for results that are only visible in that their faces are frozen and they no longer look their age.
All of the Botox and filler on faces in their 20s with full collagen production and nary a fine line in sight are making young women look significantly more mature than they are. Many factors affect how we age and Gen Z has a long way to go before they truly see signs of it, but bad fillers make for good memes and thinkpieces about how impossible it is to guess the age of Gen Z women and how millennials look younger than Gen Zers.
Nothing about preventative Botox prevents what women are actually scared of: Death. It will not make us healthier or live longer. None of the creams we slather on, plenty full of carcinogens themselves, will prevent or cure cancer, or head off chronic illness.
Being beautiful does not ensure women better access to vital, life-saving medical care or preventative care and nutrition. It does not increase funding for research that focuses specifically on critically underfunded and understudied women’s health. Upholding beauty standards does not grant gender-affirming care to those whose livelihoods depend on it.
The expectation our doctor reinforced — that we should do everything we can to look youthful well into adulthood — seems so standard in South Korea that it’s not abnormal to spot women and men alike with bandages, bruises, and raw angry flesh walking around, going about their business. I wondered if they felt embarrassed about their pursuit of youth, as I did, and if there is an insidious creeping of that shame into daily existence.
You can so easily feel sorry for moving through the world as an ugly person, or as a not-thin person, or as unfashionable. You feel compelled to participate in beauty culture just to exist a little more easily. Sometimes, what we call self-care is indistinguishable from self-flagellation. I punish myself in the name of beauty, my own form of a god, every time I look in the mirror. I cannot untangle my worship from my repentance.
If they can make you insecure, they can sell you a product. It is textbook capitalism to guilt consumers into spending their money to solve a problem that the system created. But the performance of youth and wellness will not grant us the privileges of those who are truly young and well.
In our plastic surgery clinic, as we lounged around in hospital clothes and squishy slippers, my sister and I clocked what turned out to be a family. At first, it appeared to be a mother who had simply dragged her daughters, one teen-aged and one young enough to be distracted by an iPad for hours, to entertain themselves in the waiting room because they couldn’t be left home alone.
But then, the mother happened to be discharged at the same time as we did, hours later, all of us disoriented in that way that comes from exiting a building into less daylight than when you entered it. She was dazed, clearly coming out of the haze of the anesthesia the clinic offers you for more painful procedures, and so puffy and lumpy that I couldn’t help but stare. She greeted us in the elevator, told us she and her daughters are from Indonesia and that this is the third time she’s come to the country for the “incredible” results of her procedure. She and I were both some of the more-than half a million people a year who flock to South Korea to partake in the ever-expanding beauty tourism industry.
But as I looked at her daughter, barely any evidence of puberty on her, I noticed the fresh bruising on her undereye area, the glowing pinkish hue to her skin. This girl — surely not older than 15 — had had work done too.
And then, as the elevator doors finally opened on the first floor, paramedics awaited our exit so that they could enter, rolling a little girl on a stretcher into the space our bodies had occupied before. No parents or guardians accompanied her. The ambulance she arrived in waited outside. The plastic surgery clinic we’d spend the last five hours in shared a building with a hospital and emergency room.
Earlier, they showcased the existence of the hospital mere floors below as if it were an amenity; the antibiotic ointment and restorative creams were available to us in the clinic because of the hospital below, churning out prescriptions as if our beauty were the most important task of the day.
The juxtaposition of an unconscious little girl, escorted by paramedics, surrounded by women who had voluntarily spent our money on traumatizing our faces, was haunting.
That unease I felt stayed with me for all of our treatments, particularly the ones performed by doctors in medical clinics: There is an ongoing medical crisis in Korea. Since February 2024, tens of thousands of trainee doctors have been on strike, protesting the government’s plan to churn out more doctors and medical students. They are demanding that the many privately owned hospitals alleviate long working hours and low pay for trainees rather than create more doctors competing for the same resources. Crucial services like cancer surgeries cannot be performed, emergency services have to turn patients away, and some corners are necessarily cut to lighten the load or expedite the process.
The reasons for the strike and its shocking length are complicated, but the prioritization of plastic surgery and dermatology by both hospitals and doctors over those fields that focus on vital functions is a major factor. These fields are among the most-sought-after and highest-paid concentrations in U.S. medicine, too.
Even in our shiny clinic, there was evidence of this rush toward profit. Here, we were moved from one room to the next as if in an assembly line. Thousands of clinics are seeing thousands of patients daily, a frantic beautification of a population.
While emergency room doctors are saving lives, plastic surgeons are treating ugliness as a diagnosable, curable condition. That isn’t to say plastic surgery isn’t legitimate or even valuable, or that the medical degrees of plastic surgeons are not as legitimate as those of trauma surgeons.
But nothing about the lasers and needles in my face required the performance of a hospital experience that I was given; my sister and I were both hooked up to an IV and banana bag (complementary, as a thank you for the long wait we endured). Most confusingly, post-treatment we were ushered, separately, into a hyperbaric chamber with little to no explanation of what to expect or what negative side effects to look out for, despite my anxious Google translate warnings of my chronic sinusitis and short Eustachian tubes. This was to “aid in recovery,” with scant scientific evidence that one 10-minute session could speed up the healing process for the scabbing and bruising that would color our chins for the next week and a half.
Of course, the hyperbaric chamber ended up costing 100,000 won. There might be a doctor’s strike and shortage of medical providers, but our wallets are keeping them employed in the field of plastic surgery. A capitalist society will always value profit and corporate survival over the survival of its individuals.
The shimmer that Hallyu has projected across all of South Korea has, at times, allowed me to overlook the country’s patriarchal norms and gender inequality that enabled my experience. It would be easy to assume that a country capable of advancing economically and technologically so quickly would also be more socially progressive in the ways we define that term in the West.
Of “developed” nations, South Korea has the largest gender pay gap, higher than the global average. Workers are often required to include a photo on their resumes, and women are disproportionately discriminated against when management — overwhelmingly male — doesn’t like what they see.
Expectations of marriage and motherhood overshadow career ambitions or personal happiness. And partly because of a young population increasingly rejecting these standards, South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world. Its suicide rate is the fourth-highest. People are tired.
In Flawless, Hu details the countermovement “escape the corset.” Participants dismiss the social pressure to conform to beauty standards by shaving their heads, destroying their cosmetic products, and wearing gender-neutral, unisex clothing.
Most women report that this is extremely difficult to do at first; they risk rejection by their friends, at work, and even by their families, all of whom are upholding a status quo in a very community-based society that relies on a set of unspoken rules to function properly. Neighbors take care of neighbors, an approach I find so refreshing compared to the U.S.’s individualistic, me-and-mine-first philosophy. But a self-sustaining ecosystem can require all participants to share the same values; if those values include expectations of women’s appearances, rejecting beauty standards can be seen as a rejection of a whole community.
Escape the corset inspired the 4B movement, which has recently gained traction in the US post-election after some women woke up to the misogyny that rules this country and the number of men in their lives who prop it up. The concept of 4B is that women reclaim their power by refusing to participate in the four Bs — bisekseu (비섹스), bichulsan (비출산), biyeonae (비연애), and bihon (비혼). No sex with men, no giving birth, no dating men, and no marriage to men.
4B isn’t an organized or centralized movement, allowing women to participate quietly and avoid scrutiny. The anonymity also allows women to move through the world safely. Part of the movement’s impetus was the murder of a woman by a man who stated that he did so because she ignored him. It was never classified as a hate crime.
These countermovements reflect a collective rage against the oppressive norms women are expected to perform and our willingness to internalize our failings within beauty culture as personal failings. We find ourselves with more time and energy to do literally anything else when we shift the blame toward the expectations and those who set them.
What would I be able to accomplish if I spent less time not only improving my appearance but thinking about my appearance and worrying about the message my appearance sends? I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter, for one. I would have spent more time enjoying Seoul, a city I really, really loved. I would have spent more time in museums, burning my mouth on hotteok, trying to learn Hangeul, strolling through temple grounds, sitting in coffee shops, screaming loudly in noraebangs, eating ramen by the Han River. And if I spent less money on my beauty routines, I’d be able to afford to go back sooner.
Despite it all — and there is a lot to spite — I don’t necessarily regret any procedures I partook in during my week in Seoul, though I do wish I could say that they were eye-opening enough to push me toward the escape the corset girls or to embrace my acne. I cannot say I’ll never get Botox again or that I won’t make regular Sephora and Olive Young purchases. I’ll still watch K-dramas and listen to K-pop and gawk at beautiful celebrities, despite knowing that they too have been seduced by the glowing promise of beauty.
Though the South Korean government is vying for the attention of foreigners and investing in beauty tourism, as Flawless points out, Koreans cannot simply opt out without repercussions in the same way visitors can. I get to go home, a silent retreat with eyes opened and fun stories to blab about on Substack. While the U.S. has its own harmful beauty standards, like everywhere, and I’ve done more than my fair share of participating in them, I feel freer to opt out in my own country and my own culture.
Even still, it’s impossible to critique one set of standards while embracing another, particularly when white women are engaging in subtle acts of cultural appropriation through our beauty standards. I cannot delight in the whimsical packaging of Korean beauty products and cheap Korean Botox while turning up my nose at overfilled pillow lips in the U.S. If beauty is another form of oppression, all of our systems are intertwined.
I wish I had a more inspiring takeaway from my experience in Korean beauty clinics or even from reading Flawless. If this feels contradictory, it’s because it is. Maybe a singular takeaway is too simplistic anyway, and we are forever bound to be products of our environments and their constraints. An awareness is a place to start, but it sometimes, depressingly, feels like the only possible end goal, too.
Much of the critique of beauty culture falls on women, easy targets for both ire and pity. We can blame women for their superficiality, the way we stand in front of a mirror daily to pray at the altar of beauty, but dismissing all of this as the shallow whims of unenlightened women only perpetuates the myth that this is all on us. It shifts blame from our culture to the individuals who exist within it. Is it so wrong to want to feel a little beautiful in a world that rewards us for even the attempt?
At the same time, we have a responsibility to ourselves and each other to engage meaningfully with our own culture and respectfully with others’ cultures. The expectation that we chase youth and beauty until the end might not be our doing and we might not feel capable of opting out entirely, but we aren’t victims, either. We choose to engage, and we have to accept the consequences along with the ease of falling in line.
It’s both easy and hard to see how, in a few years, the U.S. could become a society functioning more similarly to South Korea. We will increasingly look toward them as we advance our own technologies, energy resources, regulations, economy, investments, and of course, beauty standards.
But maybe the aesthetics change entirely. Maybe South Korea’s women, reclaiming their agency by opting out, will inspire leagues of women elsewhere to find their own ways to radicalize, as the 4B movement is doing now. Perhaps, as our beauty standards inch toward something too heavy for us to uphold, we shift away from them. And we can feel safe turning our bare faces toward each other, toward the future.
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