The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture by Euny Hong

Author:Euny Hong [Hong, Euny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250045126
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE GANGNAM CHAINSAW MASSACRE

The adulation of K-pop stars had a bit of a dark side: it inevitably gave rise to legions of fans who were willing to go to extremes to look like their idols.

South Korea is the world’s plastic surgery capital, in terms of procedures per capita, leaving countries like Brazil and the United States in the dust. In 2011, some 1.3 percent of Koreans had some kind of cosmetic procedure; this is 35 percent higher than the United States and nearly double that of Japan or France.3 A figure like 1.3 percent might seem trivial, but not when you’re in Seoul, where the vast majority of procedures are concentrated. Some one-fifth to one-third of women in Korea’s capital (accounts vary) have undergone some kind of beauty-enhancing procedure. Apgujeong—my old neighborhood, located in the famous Gangnam district—is the absolute center of the plastic surgery hub. Though the neighborhood is smaller than one square mile in size, it contains some four hundred plastic surgery clinics.4

There is sort of a golden mean for Korean beauty, and it’s wholly different from western standards. In North America and Europe, nose reduction and silicone lips are very popular. In Brazil, fat injections, including buttock augmentation, constitute 13.7 percent of all plastic surgery procedures.5 In Korea, however, the request for any of those procedures is basically zero.

Next to articles about Samsung and Psy, the Korean obsession with cosmetic surgery is probably the most oft-reported Korean story in the western press, and the stories are framed with condescension and horror. Frequently they take the angle that Koreans are trying to look white, and these procedures are some kind of racial reassignment surgery. What utter rot.

I have had one plastic surgery procedure, the double-eyelid surgery, by which a crease is created in each eyelid to make the eyes appear rounder and larger. It’s the most frequently requested cosmetic operation in Korea, unlike North America and Europe, where breast augmentation is the top procedure.

Dr. Kim Byung-gun, director of BK Plastic Surgery Hospital in Seoul, said the double-eyelid procedure accounts for some 30 to 40 percent of his practice. Double-eyelid surgery is almost mandatory for Korean celebrities. In fact, the Korean R & B singer Rain has said in interviews that his handlers warned him that his refusal to get double-eyelid surgery would kill his career. He held out.

I caved. But I promise I look no more Caucasian now than I did the day I was born, and I have hard evidence of this: no westerner noticed.

The procedure in a Seoul clinic took twenty-five minutes, required no incisions, and left no scarring. It cost about $1,000. Just three stitches on each eyelid, which resulted in the creation of a discreet crease. A week later, when I returned to my home—Germany, at the time—none of my non-Asian friends caught on until I pointed it out.

So why bother doing it? I’m just vain. It’s kind of like that old saw that women dress up not for men but to impress other women.

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