Elise Hu reveals the dark side of Korean beauty.
Ever heard of the term K-beauty? Well, brace yourself for an unnerving truth: Even if you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, technically short for Korean beauty, you’re probably already being impacted by it. In fact, it’s pretty likely that you’re consuming images, videos, and other forms of media daily that are inspired by this international trend.
You might be receiving advertisements for the best Korean makeup and skin products. Or maybe you’re intrigued by the rising obsession with Korean pop music within the United States, in particular with the boy and girl bands BTS and Blackpink. Those groups may be focused on musical pursuits, but they still emulate very specific aesthetic standards — and that’s not accidental. Your favorite celebrity, whose makeup you were recently admiring on Instagram, might be knee-deep in the trend, too.
K-beauty is obviously about beauty, but specifically, it describes a certain look popularized by Korean pop stars and shows, which depict young people with poreless skin, youthful faces, and very thin bodies. And it’s no accident that it originated in a country that’s currently the plastic surgery capital of the world.
If you’re thinking, “This sounds pretty familiar,” you’re not wrong: K-beauty standards have a major overlap with American aesthetic standards. Both tend to encourage the purchase of expensive skincare products, not to mention the use of injectables like Botox, weight loss tools like Ozempic, and sometimes even face-alteration surgeries. And a new book is blowing the secrets of this global aesthetic wide open.
Elise Hu is an American broadcast journalist who hosts the TED Talks Daily podcast and serves as a host-at-large for NPR. From 2015 to 2018, she was NPR’s bureau chief for Seoul, South Korea — which is where she got the idea for her new book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital.
Hu shared with us some of her most important learnings about the dark side of this craze, including how you can identify it, and how you can find ways to live with (or without) it.
KCM: What inspired you to write this book? Were there any specific moments in particular that changed your relationship with beauty?
Elise Hu: This work was unfinished business from my time as an international correspondent [in Seoul].
In South Korea, [the culture] is so visual, increasingly virtual, and so many advanced aesthetic upgrades are available. It’s the cosmetic surgery capital of the world and the third-biggest cosmetics exporter in the world. During my time there, I kept running up against the idea that having good looks is our personal responsibility, and not looking “better” according to the standards of the day is a personal failing.
I kept wondering, How did things get this way? Should they be this way?
In the United States, makeup and skincare trends currently include anti-wrinkle injectables, skincare products that promise dewy/poreless skin, and Ozempic, to name a few. How would you compare the standards here to those in South Korea?
They share the same general pillars of beauty that exist across the world: thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youth. But in Korea, it’s a lot more affordable (and therefore within a middle-class person’s reach) to get work done, or even just buy quality cosmetics.
The cost of procedures in Korea — injectables or surgery, or any of the many light or laser therapies available, like Thermage — are a fraction of the price you’d pay [for the same service] in the U.S., UK, or Australia.
Making “solutions” to various “problems” that might not have actually been problems in the first place more affordable only increases the pressure and supports the logic that we should do the work.
Let’s take Ozempic. It’s rooted in one of the most pervasive standards in existence — thinness. The shadow of the thinness standard is anti-fatness, or fatphobia. In the U.S. there’s been an argument along the lines of, “Well, if Ozempic can make everyone skinny, then why not?”
This echoes the logic I saw in South Korea about all kinds of body modification — if the “solution” to this “problem” exists, then why not? If you don’t have to have freckles, zap them off! But short-term self-interest is bad for all of us.
Just like the solution to homophobia isn’t to make everyone straight, the solution to fatphobia shouldn’t be to make everyone skinny, and the solution to lookism (appearance-based discrimination) isn’t to make everyone “pretty.” We should ideally be doing the opposite — breaking the link between appearance and worthiness, affirming one another’s bodily autonomy without trying to problematize and fix our outsides, and celebrating the rich diversity of one another because it’s part of the human experience.
Where do you think beauty culture is heading?
Thanks to the internet, standards are flattening into global ideals instead of locally or regionally specific ones. And in an increasingly visual and virtual world, I see beauty trends becoming more and more determined by what we see on screens and in metaverses, and what is possible on screens, i.e. filters and AI-generated effects.
The TikTok Bold Glamour effect is wild. It’s an example of how AI is learning to imitate the “molds” of current physical beauty and making filters to mimic that, so we can all look like one of the Kardashian sisters in an instant.
The more we use these tools, the more data we’re giving the AI to essentially show that we like this stuff. It’s self-reinforcing.
What advice would you give to young women about how to engage with these societal pressures?
I think often about how our bodies have become endless projects to “work on.” The way I engage with this pressure is to be kinder to myself.
Being kinder to myself has also helped unlock a deeper compassion toward others. When it comes to aesthetic labor, products, or practices, you can ask yourself, who am I trying to be? I really try to ask myself, Is this something that makes me feel more like me — like is this nurturing to me in my soul? Or does it feel like a costume — like I’m doing it at an ego level — because of what other people might think?
It takes a critical mass to say, much like the Korean women in my book did, that we want to remap our relationship with our bodies to prioritize how they feel and what they do, rather than what they look like. Developing a sense of self where appearance is only a small part of the whole is so crucial — and liberating.
