Interesting article about beauty
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007BEAUTY: THE KOREAN WAY
by Julia Yoo
“Thank goodness you have ssang-ku-pool. Your parents saved a lot of money,” said a close family friend when I was five years old. Ssang-ku-pul
is the line above the eyelid, which most every Caucasian has but is
rare among Northeast Asians. According to Sandy Cobrin, only 25% of
Koreans are born with the double eye-lid crease, and she describes
eye-lid surgery as “stitching a permanent crease into the eye-lid.”
After observing the Korean trends and Korean pop culture idols for many
years from a Korean-American perspective, I think I have figured out
the meaning of Korean beauty. It is a very complicated and profound
one. Beauty means having big eyes, a pale complexion, a sharp and
pointed nose, a taller height, and a small chin and mouth. Essentially,
South Korean beauty meant looking as “white” or Caucasian as possible.
I never quite understood how having lines above my eyelids
saved my parents money until the summer of 1998 when I visited Korea. I
knew that the lines above my eyes supposedly made them appear larger
than other “Asian eyes,” but I did not see the financial connection
until I saw my aunt in Korea whom I hadn’t seen for years. She just had
eyelid surgery a year before, and I noticed how the lines above her
eyes opened them up so that they appeared a bit rounder. She was
beaming as she was telling me how she got a discount on the surgery,
paying only $700 because she knew the surgeon. Then she was telling my
sister, who wasn’t blessed with ssang-ku-pul
like me, to get the surgery through the surgeon she knew. She was going
on about how the majority of the female Korean population gets this
eyelid surgery and how lucky she was to have
connections. I felt
fortunate; I had saved seven hundred dollars. But instead of yelling
this aloud, I remained silent. For the first time in my life, I felt a
bit ashamed of my race.
The moment I stepped out into the city from my aunt’s
apartment, I noticed cosmetic surgery clinics everywhere, along with
billboards featuring Korean women who had Western characteristics.
Nowhere could I spot a single ad containing a model with small eyes, a
round face, and a small nose. None of them looked like the familiar
Korean faces I remembered from my previous visits to Korea. A little
later, I saw a girl walking out of one of the clinics with a
funny-looking face mask and huge sunglasses. My aunt said the mask was
to protect her new nose, and the sunglasses were to protect her newly
cut out eyelids. I just sighed. Here I was in my family’s native
country for the first time in years, yearning to experience the essence
of Korea, and I found myself bombarded with McDonald’s, Nike and those
Korean-wannabe-white faces.
According to an online site, Medscape, “South Korea has the
highest ratio of cosmetic surgeons to citizens worldwide.” It has
become so common that girls will get eyelid surgery as high school
graduation presents. I still did not understand. Unsurprisingly, a year
after that particular visit to Korea, both my teenaged cousins had
gotten eyelid surgeries just in time for their sweet-sixteenth
birthdays. The plague of plastics had hit my own family! This just made
the wonder grow deeper: What about plastic surgery made so many Koreans
fall so madly in love with it?
Plastic surgery has some kind of magical appeal to them—the
promise of beauty. In this mystical and arduous quest for good looks,
women are often convinced that suffering and sacrificing is necessary
and worthy in order to bear the fruits of beauty. And this suffering is
not for nothing. With good looks, the Korean society believes that
beauty leads to attracting a better-looking partner, which leads to a
better lifestyle and better-looking children. Oh, and of course, better
looks equals better chances for competitive jobs, especially in the
business field. Essentially, they believe that physical beauty equals
happiness.
And in Korea, we impossibly apply the same standards for
beauty as the Western world does. A woman should be tall, thin, with a
milky complexion, chiseled facial features, long legs, nice big eyes,
and the perfectly-angled nose. Ann Shin’s film, “Western Eyes”
thoroughly and accurately captures the essence of the struggle for
Asian-American women striving for Western beauty. The protagonists
resort to cosmetic surgery in search of beauty and acceptance,
believing that their appearance, especially their eyes, will alter the
way others perceive them. The immigrant women believe cosmetic surgery
is the key to their assimilation in a predominantly white town.
However, the Asian immigrants in the movie are different from the women
in Korea, such as my aunt, who do not live around white people, yet
experience similar internal dilemmas with their appearances. So if
environment is not the primary cause of this drive to look “whiter,”
then what is?
The next closest thing to living around white people is
seeing them all over TV, billboards, and magazines. With globalization
alive and well in South Korea, Western pop culture has mushroomed into
every corner of the country. Lacoste, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Louis
Vuitton, and Chanel are only a few of the heavily sought-out Western
brands. The Koreans exchange their advanced electronic devices through
companies such as LG, Samsung, Hyundai, and Kia in return for Western
clothing, cosmetics, and pop idols such as Britney Spears and Justin
Timberlake. However, Koreans do not just admire these Western idols.
They not only want to purchase their albums and clothes, but they also
want to look like them. Perhaps this explains why the majority of
Korean celebrities have gone under the knife at least once. For
instance, Korean pop star Boa Kwon, who now rules the female pop world
in all of Northeast Asia (Japan, China, and Korea), got eyelid surgery
and her nose heightened. So, just as Britney Spears wooed little
American girls to dress in plaid mini skirts and midriff bearing
shirts, Boa has inspired and assured many Korean girls that cosmetic
surgery is the normal and “cool” thing to do.
This rush for Western beauty has not only plagued South
Korea, but is seeping into other parts of Asia, such as Japan and
China. Korean pop culture is dominating Asia today with its soap opera
series, movies, cosmetics, and technology. In 2004, after the hit TV
show “Dae-jang-geum,” many Japanese and Taiwanese women flocked to
South Korean cosmetic clinics asking to look like the hit’s main
character, Young-Hae Lee, who is known for her big round eyes, small
chin, and high nose. Newsweek describes the westernization of beauty
standards: “Eastern and Western tastes have been cross-pollinating with
a vengeance…The zaftig Indian goddesses and the heart-shaped face of
the Chinese beauty are yielding to round eyes, oblong faces and lean
figures.” But perhaps this surge for Western beauty is just an
ephemeral trend, like skinny-legged jeans.
Much evidence indicates that this beauty ideal is not a
trend, but a very real standard that is growing deeper into Korean
society. Appearance is starting to play a bigger role in the workplace,
to the extent that men are starting to resort to cosmetic surgery also.
For instance, my 29 year old male cousin, who is slim and over six feet
tall, gets significantly more job offers than his best male friend, who
is shorter and heavier, even though both of them graduated from the
same prestigious college, Seoul National University, and had the same
GPA and credentials. Also, ABC news reports that cosmetic surgery
clinics in Korea are getting significantly higher rates of male
patients, and in some areas, about a third of the clients are males.
The most popular surgeries among these men are almost identical to
those for women—eyelid and nose jobs. In other words, this shows that
the standards for beauty not only apply to women, but also to men.
According to a Men’s Health Research, “86 percent of South Korean men
between age 25 and 37 believe their competitiveness for jobs would be
increased by having a good appearance and healthy body,” and over half
the South Korean male population are dissatisfied with their
appearance. Also, it is not a coincidence that all the Miss Universe
contestants in the past two decades look so westernized to the point
that it is hard to distinguish which contestants are Asian, Caucasian,
Hispanic, and African. Therefore, the continuing high rates of cosmetic
surgeries, and the growing number of Korean celebrities who look almost
“white” as a result of these procedures, indicate the extent to which
Western beauty standards have been ingrained into South Korea.
Perhaps the quest for western beauty is political as well
as cultural. Going back to the Imperialist era in the 1800’s, the
notion of white supremacy is still alive in our minds since Western
nations, such as the United States, are still the most powerful and
wealthiest. Perhaps even the notions of “walking, talking, and looking”
like the white race still exist to the subtlest extents. For instance,
many countries around the world, including South Korea, are required to
speak English, the language of the world power—the United States—as
their second language. As a result, most South Korean students are
reasonably fluent in English by the time they reach high school.
Perhaps the obsession with beauty is due to the fact that
human nature always strives for what is thought to be better. So
Koreans associate beauty with people of countries that are wealthier
than they are, and as a result strive to be more like them. For
instance, some less wealthy Southeast Asian nations strive for
Northeast Asian beauty, such as a lighter complexion and taller
figures. Then the Northeast Asians strive to be like the even wealthier
nations who are even lighter and taller than they are. And then within
the wealthy western nations, the southern Europeans strive to be like
the Germans and Western Europeans who are the tallest and wealthiest.
In essence, this quest for beauty is no different than the quest for
any other greed in life, such as money and fame. There is always
someone more beautiful, richer, taller, and smarter. We always want
what we can’t have. Many women see the impossibly thin supermodels with
large breasts and a perfectly chiseled face, and all secretly admire
them. We cannot help but wonder about people and places that we will
never be or see. And this is why we will never see an average five foot
three woman of 140 pounds walking the fashion runways in Versace. Our
elusive journey toward this complete perfection that we can never
achieve begins.
Or perhaps this standard of beauty comes from the human
tendency to conform. We tend to simplify notions in life into black or
white, good or evil, happy or sad, beautiful or ugly. And as
globalization and westernization seeped into Northeast Asia, so did its
notions of beauty. Because Paris and New York are the centers of
fashion, the Koreans may have started to look toward them to set the
standards of physical beauty as well. As a result, the Koreans wanted
to bridge the gap between their physical appearances and that of the
whites to the extent that they have pursued plastic surgery.
The solution to this plague is starting with the
transformation of one individual at a time in South Korea. The fact
that nearly half the population is somehow displeased with their
appearance and willing to undergo cosmetic surgery shows that something
is culturally wrong here. But before these individuals can change, the
change needs to begin with the role models in Korea, the celebrities
and other media figures. Essentially, the face of Korean media needs to
change. They need to stop sending the message that beauty means Nicole
Kidman and Britney Spears, and instead show that true Asian
characteristics are beautiful too. They need to realize that smaller
eyes, rounder faces, and flatter noses can be beautiful. By continuing
to have eyelid surgeries and nose jobs, the Koreans are rejecting their
natural Asian beauties and perpetuating the notion that western
features are more beautiful.
NOTE:
The
texts cited in this essay are: Burt Herman, “S. Korea Sees Boom in Male
Plastic Surgery,” in ABC News Health, 2006; Sandy Cobrin,
“Asian-Americans Criticize Eyelid Surgery Craze,” in Women’s E-news,
2004. Fred Guterl and Michael Hastings, “The Global Makeover,” in
Newsweek, 2003; Medscape Today, “Cosmetic Surgery Past, Present, and
Future,” 2006; Ann Shin, “Western Eyes,” 2000.Credits Julia Yoo from Culture Shock.
haahaa……my Archie comics!!! which i left at her house when i moved back to Malaysia….i missed them!!! n some things i told pancy to get for me…..n her gifts!!! Pancy bought me 12 bottles of chilli sauce!!!!! which is more than anyone can eat!!! wah lau eh!!!! n she bought me MEIJI FRAN!!! delicious fran which she got a fren to get it for her from Sabah n some other Japanese snacks haahaa…..which included some korean snacks cuz she tot they were japanese!!! n my lovely Meiji chocolates!!! I love Meiji!!! She also brough huge bags of chestnuts and almonds….with their shells still attached!! tralala……. THANK YOU PANCY TAN PEI JING BORN ON 5TH APRIL 1987 LIVING IN JERUDONG, BRUNEI!!!!
