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Growing up in the eighties in Toronto, whenever we went to visit family in South Korea, my mom would pack our suitcases with gifts including the best cosmetics we could afford, bought at Eaton’s. My, how the tables have turned.
Today, with all eyes on the Korean beauty industry, I’d travel there with an empty bag, ready to fill it with the trendiest, most exciting products on the market.
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In fact, without going anywhere, you’ve likely already experienced the influence of K-beauty. Have you dabbled in products with snail mucin or rice? That’s K-beauty. Sheet masks? Check. Have you added more steps to your skincare? That’s K-beauty, too.
As recently as a single decade ago, K-beauty was barely known in North America. Today, the K-beauty industry is booming, here and around the world.
The continued growth of this industry requires a whole lot of belief in beauty, from both you and me. Our pandemic jogging pants were a blip in time. Our top halves, Zooming through the pandemic, are catching up to Koreans, who have been face-obsessed (and uncoincidentally, more online and tech-connected than us) for years.
The global K-beauty trend isn’t due to North Americans “discovering” it. Korea’s beauty industry has been built up for decades, with a strategy that emphasizes newness, iteration and being first to market, taking place in one of the most wired countries in the world.
As part of a soft power strategy to create economic growth, Korean entertainment industries are turbo-charged by the government, through industry incentives and financial support. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently addressed U.S. Congress by saying, “Even if you didn’t know my name, you may know BTS and Blackpink.”
He’s right. And the K-beauty industry, including cosmetic-surgery tourism, is a part of that soft power strategy, with the interconnectedness of cultural industries being key. K-beauty rides a wave of K-pop and K-drama’s growing influence around the world. You couldn’t buy better advertising for Korean skincare if you tried.
These growth strategies are working. K-beauty is projected to be worth US$13.9-billion by 2027. Cosmetic R&D and manufacturing centres are able to churn new product fast, sometimes as quickly as concept to market in six weeks, much more quickly than other countries can achieve.
In fact, some European companies have simply bought Korean beauty brands, such as in 2019, when Estée Lauder acquired Dr. Jart+ in an acquisition of its parent company, worth US$1.1-billion. Unilever bought Carver Korea, a skincare company, in 2017 for US$2.7-billion.
Being Korea-curious my whole life, the K-beauty industry has been a great way for me to learn more about Korean culture but it’s also raised bigger questions about capitalism, technology and how rigid our societies are about what we believe beauty should look like.
Korean culture is known for its exacting beauty standards. The look is dewy, young, luminous and natural (“natural,” however, is not to be confused with wearing less makeup).
“Koreans love that pale, milky skin, and a straighter eyebrow, which makes you look younger,” explains Grace Lee, a Korean-Canadian makeup artist.
Makeup artist Grace Lee.Supplied
“Korean girls love to place blush under the eyes, right on the pads of the cheek so it looks more like a natural flush. Whereas North Americans are all about exaggerating and elongating on the sides of the face to look more snatched and uplifted.” Think Hailey Bieber, all the Kardashians and the contouring craze of the past decade.
I’ve always had a Korean face but I’m Canadian, born and raised, and I won’t lie – it’s been a thrill in recent years to see faces like mine as I binge Korean content on Netflix and YouTube.
But while I grew up feeling like I existed outside of a white, Western beauty standard, I’ve recently faced the fact that Korean beauty standards aren’t exactly kind to me, either – just a regular, 45-year-old mom who does manage to wash her face twice a day.
It should go without saying that no culture is a monolith, but I’ll take a moment to say it, anyway, because I’m wary of Koreans being criticized for being unilaterally looks-obsessed. Yes, Korea may be known for this. But we all participate in pretty privilege, the world over, whether we say it out loud or not.
“We all joke, my Korean friends,” says Lee, the makeup artist. “After our 50s, we all wanna go to Korea, eat a ridiculous amount of food and come back with a brand new face.” She laughs.
“That’s not a unique fantasy,” I laugh, too.
K-beauty without borders
When American journalist Elise Hu landed in Seoul in 2014, she quickly felt judgment not only for her looks but for the choices they implied. For example, why would anyone have freckles?
Journalist Elise Hu.Supplied
“A lot of folks were just aghast that I would keep them when there was so much technology available that can remove them,” says Hu. While living and working in Korea, she began research for her new book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, which digs into an obsession that is personal and cultural at the same time, tied to the pursuit of self-improvement in a hyper-competitive, image-based society.
“I don’t think I would have even thought to write this book had I not had my own complex, reflective, sometimes conflicted relationship with physical beauty,” Hu says. “Beauty is a tent pole of the modern woman’s experience everywhere.”
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Hu has written a brilliant, deeply researched book that reads like a conversation with your smartest friend. I especially welcome reporting – wide, expansive, inclusive – that lays out why, for Koreans, “availing yourself of cosmetic services and procedures is understood as a matter of self-respect, personal management, and respect for the community.”
Refreshingly, the author’s lack of Western judgment makes way for curiosity and respect. Not everything needs to be explained from a Western lens. Hu sidesteps that trap with deep historical and social context going all the way back to early Joseon dynasty, 500 years ago, to explain the roots of Korean beauty ideals today. When you go back that far, Korea’s cultural lineage gets detached from more recent, Western incursions such as Hollywood and globalization.
It’s that context that helps explain the high social cost to those who eschew beauty norms in Korea. Feminism clashes with a tradition of patriarchy. Cosmetic surgery can be a normal expectation of a woman from her friends, family and even employer. The job market is very competitive and photos on resumés are normalized. Any choice over opting in or out of beauty culture is an illusion. “The body is an instrument you take to work in order to earn a paycheck,” Hu writes. “It is also a worksite of its own, open 24/7.”
Korean beauty companies so completely saturated the Korean capacity for self-improvement, they needed to go global to achieve more growth. K-beauty looks get traction as streamers double-down (Netflix recently committed to US$2.5-billion in South Korean TV production for global audiences) and K-pop stars deepen their direct, digital ways of connecting with megafandoms, such as Mr. Yoon’s favourites, BTS and Blackpink.
Initially Hu was delighted with exploring Korean skincare, seeing it as a needed distraction from work and life. But with deeper research and an eye open to the technological gaze (think filters and how we privilege our digital selves to our physical ones as we share our lives online), she realized, “this is capitalism reaching into our flesh and blood.”
Moving the needle
The beauty industry, no matter where you are in the world, is complicated – on a personal level but culturally, too. For Dr. Anthony Youn, whatever their aesthetic lens – Western, Korean or otherwise – it’s important to him that no one carries shame about their features.
Plastic surgeon and YouTube content creator Dr. Anthony Youn.Supplied
The Korean-American plastic surgeon and YouTube content creator is based in Detroit. When he first started his clinic, he thought he would perform the two surgeries that are among the top procedures in Korea – eyelid surgery and rhinoplasty.
But over time, he changed his mind, especially on eyes. “My daughter was born in 2008 and she has monolids, she does not have the extra fold in her eyelid,” he says. “For her to think she’s not beautiful because she has my eyelids, the eyelids of my ancestors, I thought it’s just not right.”
“We get a lot of people that call for those operations and we do refer them to other doctors. I’m not here to judge anybody. But at the same time, I don’t feel that I have to support that necessarily,” he says.
It’s no surprise that eyelid surgery is complicated for Korean people in the diaspora. I feel that way, too, and rejected it when it was casually suggested to me as a teen. But as Hu, the American journalist, outlines the history of plastic surgery in Korea, she explains that it’s overly reductive to say the popularity of Korean eyelid surgery is an attempt to look less Asian.
Same goes for the Korean beauty ideal of pale skin.
“Light skin was something that was viewed as a marker of high status even in the earliest dynasties in Korea because it signified that you weren’t outdoors. White skin as something to be desired has been, gosh, thousands of years old. It’s a local norm and not necessarily the forces of global culture – which isn’t to say it’s good, right?” Hu says.
Devouring Hu’s book, I started with a sense of fun but plunged into a feminist, late-capitalism state of despair, wondering, what is good about the pursuit of beauty for oneself? Which is why I’m grateful Hu delivered me to the ending she wrote, in which she mused on the vastness of variation in the natural world, all of which has a unique essence. That’s true beauty.
When we lift our eyes up from our phones and take a break from selfie mode, it can be a cure for manufactured conformity, whether it’s defined by Korean beauty ideals or our own, in North America.