In this op-ed, Korean-American writer Rosa Jisoo Pyo explores how the popularity of K-beauty has reinforced harsh beauty standards and how many Korean women are striving to change that.
When I went to South Korea last October, the signs of summer still lingered in the air and on my face. Freckles sprinkled across my nose and onto my cheeks, which still had a perpetual flush from the uncanny autumn heat. I was in my season, I was in my prime.
My dad and I arrived after a 14-hour flight (an extra two hours than usual to avoid Ukrainian and Russian airspace), and he immediately wanted to go out. His eldest sister's place, where we were staying, was in the heart of Seoul, just a ten-minute walk from Jamsil Main Street. It was the night, it was the weekend (Sunday). My older cousin was coaxed into joining us.
“If you saw me on the street would you think I was born here, a native Korean?” I asked.
“No,” she said and then paused, looking at me, “You’re too dark.”
Whatever hope, which I didn’t even know I had, passing for a Korean born and raised in Korea fell flat like a poster. Her voice had no sign of malice or cruelty. She spoke in a very matter-of-fact way because she was right. I spent most of my summer unencumbered under the sun’s semi-violent gaze. I was tan, kept my moles, loved my freckles, and had a single fold on my eyelid. I felt like a “bad Korean.”
Between K-Pop taking over the music charts, K-dramas becoming some of the most-watched series, and the rise in popularity of Korean beauty products, Korea’s cultural impact around the world has never been more obvious. But while this output has no doubt catapulted a rich and vibrant culture into the spotlight in so many positive ways, there is a downside. Namely, the overlooking of harsh beauty standards embedded within Korean culture.
In Korean culture, it is no longer enough to cover your “flaws” — acne, pimples, hyperpigmentation, wrinkles — with makeup, your skin must simply not have any. I wish Koreans wore sunscreen just for safety (although the health benefits are amazing) but the truth is many do it to not look as “dark” as I did to my cousin. If you go to an outdoor swimming pool in Korea, seldom will you see many in swimsuits. Rather, most wear rash guards, full-length pants, and sun visors to cover their entire bodies, along with a thick coat of sunscreen, as documented in NPR Seoul founding Bureau Chief Elise Hu’s book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.
“So much of the ‘skin care first’ or just having a really beautiful canvas before you put on makeup; That idea and that concept originates from South Korea,” Hu says. In her book, Hu describes the Korean beauty standard as “milky white, smooth, glowing, with a narrow nose, anime-sized eyes, and a small, delicate jawline that meets at a V.”
One of the reasons why Americans have been wearing sunscreen more might be the growing popularity of South Korean sunscreen. This is a good thing because, American Academy of Dermatology estimates that one in five Americans will get skin cancer in their lifetime. But sunscreen has also become a virtue signal for an altered version of self-care; you don't care for a future self that is wrinkly. Jessica Defino, writer of The Unpublishable, touched upon this moral impertinence in the digital pop culture newsletter Dirt, writing, “The beauty industry’s stance on sunscreen is one of extremism. Get absolutely no sun. If you don’t wear SPF, don’t bother taking care of your skin at all.”
However, it's not like the West is just willy-nilly accepting Korean beauty standards. After Single’s Inferno’s Moon Sehoon called a castmate he liked “so white and pure,” and fellow contestant Choi Sihun said, “I like people who have light skin,” there was swift online backlash.
I remember when I came face to face with a cohort of flight attendants at the Incheon airport when I came to Korea for the first time. The women were effervescent and elegant despite just coming off their flights with skin so milky they looked like they were under perpetual moonlight. They were beautiful and that beauty helped them secure a job, one of the most coveted positions in Korea. Their whiteness enveloped me, and it was hard not to crumple.
In the humidity, we left the airport and took the bus. I felt a pang of sadness as I tried to relate to the landscape that zoomed past me. My dad must have felt the same. With a finger, he pointed out the window and talked about how this used to be that, and so forth. Nothing was the same as when he was a little boy, not even our faces.
While whiteness is still the more obvious denominator, there are other, more subtle changes that indicate the pervasiveness of Korean beauty standards. Changes you can miss in the blink of an eye.
While the origins of double eyelid surgery began in 19th century Japan, it was Dr. Ralph Millard, the Chief Plastic Surgeon to the U.S. Marine Corps, who popularized the procedure during the Korean War, according to University of Pennsylvania Korea Foundation Assistant Professor Dr. So-Rim Lee. Double eyelid surgery, or Asian blepharoplasty, was first popular among sex workers, translators, and war wives, those with close proximity to white and Western people.
Before Dr. Millard’s death, he was nominated by The American Society of Plastic Surgeons as one of the top 10 plastic surgeons of the millennium. While lauded for this cleft palate repair, his effect on physically molding the Korean identity by scalpel and thread would have a lasting effect. According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, eyelid surgery was the third most popular surgical procedure done worldwide in 2022. Now, surgery is not the only way. Eyelid tape is a recent viral phenomenon seen in endless beauty tutorials catered to young audiences on social media.
A tangle of identity is what is left of America’s militarization at the 38th parallel, where 28,500 U.S. troops today stand at a self-drawn line in the sand. When we talk of colonization, we often talk of land. But what of the body? What of the face? Can the racist history of double eyelids ever be severed from white supremacy? Iris Yi Youn Kim, a reporter at NBC whose viral personal essay in Harper’s Bazaar, “I Had Korean Double Eyelid Surgery at 18. I Look Back Now with Regret,” is also unsure.
“It's hard to completely extricate the Western influences of the surgery," Kim tells Teen Vogue. “I do think that it has evolved to become something more, a technological kind of beauty: Instagram face. Vaguely Middle Eastern, vaguely Asian, vaguely Caucasian.”
Korean people are not explicitly trying to look white. There always seemed to be a bit of superior undertones when Americans asked why Koreans want to look white. (Of course, when I say “Americans” here, I’m mostly talking about white people in America).
While the current guard of Korean beauty standards may not be ceded with the goal of “looking white,” “You are not going to destroy this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it,” bell hooks said, which is ultimately what Korea has done.
But ultimately, chasing after a narrow box of acceptability is extremely marginalizing. “This kind of beauty industry in this kind of beauty culture can't exist without underclasses, constantly aspiring to be more like the upper classes,” Hu tells Teen Vogue.
In South Korea, the culture around looking beautiful is a matter of personal responsibility and has been primarily after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which tripled Korea’s unemployment rate. Being in a constant state of financial insecurity despite also being the thirteenth largest economy according to the International Trade Administration. This is where employment surgery came into the mix. With intense competition with limited jobs and capital, Koreans turned to their bodies as a way to compete.
While beauty products can be a way to practice self-care, the practice of beauty can often feel like labor. South Korea’s “Escape The Corset” movement is one of the many ways Korean women have been rebelling against the country’s tiresome patriarchal aesthetic demands. “If you talk to South Korean women, many of them, especially those that are part of the feminist backlash to beauty standards, would say that these are really oppressive and exhausting that having to do all of this aesthetic labor, at the expense of spending time working or nurturing their passions and their hobbies,” Hu says, recalling her experience conducting interviews with women for her book.
When I think of the beauty standards stacked on top of each other like mattresses in The Princess and the Pea, I think of Toni Morrison saying, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” I remember her words because the function of beauty standards is to also distract.
While I love Korean skin care products and makeup, I have always felt a very thin line between self-care and vanity. Between passion and obsession. Between health and narcissism. While a bulk of my writing has been about K-beauty, I often felt guilty about gushing about K-beauty products that are an inevitable extension of toxic beauty standards.
I want to wear sheet masks, but I don’t want ones that lighten my complexion. I want eyeliner that won't transfer, but I don’t want to use double eyelid tape. Though I am well aware I do not represent the entire Asian diaspora, especially the Korean community in America and in Korea, I do think reckoning with how colonization, sexism, white supremacy, hypercapitalism, racism, and classism have inundated the beauty standard is worth reflecting on.
I returned from South Korea to the United States in darkness. My hair was red. My suitcase was fat with Korean makeup and skincare. A new tattoo was on my left arm. I had put sunscreen on during the flight — twice. I sat awake, waiting for sunrise downstairs at my parent’s house. I waited and waited and waited until I pulled the heavy sliding glass doors; I stepped into the light like Persephone, letting the sun darken my face.