Life in Plastic: Fantastic?

Brace yourselves: this week I’m going to write about something I probably have no business writing about. (Again.)

Jezebel, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted a reaction piece inspired by a segment from the radio show This American Life. The episode was about self improvement, and it was anchored by a brief interview with a woman who had moved to South Korea to teach English at an all-girls high school. Like any true American, she was stunned to realize that people in other parts of the world don’t necessarily think the way we do: There were full-length mirrors and scales on every floor of the school she taught at. Her students used both regularly, and dreamed of the day they would be rewarded with plastic surgery for having passed their college entrance exams.

As an American who’s spent the past year using television to be a peeping tom into Korean culture, this interview and article made me uncomfortable on a few levels. First of all, both are predicated on the assumption that America is somehow different from Korea, a place where physical appearance doesn’t matter. Anyone who truly believes that—as the interviewee obviously does—is both naive and uninformed.

While Korea may embrace plastic surgery in a way America doesn’t (yet), the two nations aren’t that different. I suspect you could easily find girls longing for plastic surgery in high schools from Maine to Alaska to California. And while we give a lot of lip service to equal opportunity and social mobility here, discrimination based on looks is not illegal, as the presenter of This American Life helpfully reminded listeners. Our resumes and college applications don’t have spots for our photographs, unlike the ones prepared in Korea. But studies still show that in America taller people tend to be more professionally successful than shorter people; heavier people are less likely to be hired than their thinner counterparts; and men make more money than women. Discrimination based on race actually is illegal, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. So what’s better? Pretending that looks don’t matter in your society, or acknowledging that they do?

I suspect the author of the Jezebel article and I have similar reactions to plastic surgery being used for solely aesthetic purposes—a mixture of anger and sadness. What makes us believe that we’re not good enough as we are? Why must everyone on the planet look exactly the same? What is it that drives us to remake ourselves from the bone up, just so we look like someone—or something—else?

Ultimately, though, I acknowledge that this is just a particularly tempting kind of hypocrisy. As a liberal who believes I should have full rights to my body—whether I want to eat a Twinkie, get thirty-five piercings in places that can be hidden by a bikini, or become a nudist—I also have to allow that plastic surgery is a personal choice, and that it’s none of my business when someone else makes it. The Jezebel article is too busy gawking at the (admittedly horrifying) Tumblr devoted to Korean plastic surgery to make this connection. But when the first article in your latest news section is about the importance of Roe v. Wade, the American court case that legalized abortion, it seems somehow less than kosher to be critical of people who undergo surgery just because it isn’t in line with (y)our ideology. 

It is true that South Korea has the highest per-capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. According to the Economist, one in five women in Seoul have gone under the knife for cosmetic reasons. It’s hard to say just why plastic surgery is so widespread in Korea, but a recent CNN article about Seoul as a travel destination for surgery offered an interesting theory: “To Koreans, beauty is something that is attainable through hard work—just like anything else. ‘It’s not just about desire,” says [plastic surgeon] Kwon. ‘I prefer to use the word ‘challenge’—Koreans see plastic surgery, and becoming prettier, as a challenge.’” These are people who have seen their homeland change from an agricultural backwater to an economic powerhouse in a few generations, all thanks to hard work. Why shouldn’t a body be at least as malleable, as improvable, as a nation?

As a drama watcher, the commonness of plastic surgery in Korea isn’t exactly news to me. Korean standards of beauty seem to be both extremely precise and largely unrealistic. An affinity for Kdrama has expanded my vocabulary by leaps and bounds, but no single category of words is as new to me as the ones describing beauty. S-line? V-line? Ant waist? Double lids? “Your face is so small!”: None of it meant a thing to me before Kdrama came into my life. It’s true that I’m a frump from northern New England who buys her shoes at a store called Farm Way and has been known to slip into a polar-fleece vest on occasion, but I’m still relatively sure that most of these concepts don’t exist in American English. As far as I know there’s no real counterpart to them, either.

Any illusions I may have had about natural beauty on Korean television were shattered early on in my obsession, when purported before and after photos of actress Park Min Young became ubiquitous on the Internet. The first picture is from a school yearbook and therefore isn’t particularly flattering (some things really are universal, aren’t they?). Park Min Young is not quite smiling in this photo, and her head is tilted at the same inquisitive angle photographers demanded for my own school photographs. She’s waring a dark blue dress shirt buttoned to the very top button, and her hair is hanging in a smooth, low-maintenance bob. Her face is full but pleasant. Her eyelids are uncreased (or monolided, in Korean parlance), her nose is small and low-bridged, and her jawline is U-shaped. The second photo is so different that I’m genuinely unconvinced that it’s really the same girl. Taken from a lower angle, it emphasizes the V of her pointy chin, a pair of impossibly huge doe eyes, and a nose that’s both high-bridged and sharply defined. This version of Park Min Young is wearing a ton of makeup and has outgrown her baby fat, which can account for some of the changes.

Eventually Park Min Young admitted to having both a nose job and eyelid surgery, and if this before photo is to be trusted that might actually be the tip of the iceberg. No matter how common plastic surgery is in Korea, it’s not something celebrities are proud of or usually discuss candidly.

Since seeing these photos, I’ve spent much more time than I wanted to speculating about the surgical histories of drama stars. I think it’s safe to say that many of the actors we see regularly in Korean drama have been altered in one way or another. Sometimes they’ve even had so much work that I can barely stand to watch them. With their faces scrubbed of any hint of humanity, these folks bring to mind the uncanny valley, a hypothesis explaining how humans might react to robots with increasingly human appearances. As long as they’re either very robotic or incredibly human, we’re fine. But when they’re in the uncomfortable “almost human” zone, the theory states that people will react with revulsion. This is an exact description of my response to Lee Ji Ah’s face in Me Too Flower, and the faces of many other Korean actresses since.

From the perspective of someone who watches a lot of Korean television, I’d be happy to see less plastic surgery. And from the perspective of a human being, I think the growing acceptance of plastic surgery around the world is worrying. Just what are you supposed to do when you need to have your jawbone shaved to get a job, but can’t afford to have your jawbone shaved because you don’t have a job? Will this create an underclass of people who don’t have the means for plastic surgery?

And what will happen in ten years when styles change? Will future generations feel forced to upgrade to the hot new nose implant in the same way we upgrade to the latest computer hardware? My mother’s high school best friend fell victim to a trend of the early 70s: she plucked her brows down to almost nothing and drew new ones on, mimicking Greta Garbo’s arch. After a while of this her eyebrows just stopped growing back. Forty years later she’s still stuck drawing them on, just as she did on the day her senior picture was taken. I bet she regrets the whole thing. And someday all these sharp-chinned Korean girls might regret their hands-on approach to skeleton ownership, too.

12 Men in a Year: A happy customer

One of the arguments for plastic surgery that comes up in the Jezebel article is that it gives people confidence. Maybe that’s true for a while, but every cosmetic procedure ever invented won’t change the person you are on the inside. I have comparable experience on this front: when I went away to college, I lost a ton of weight. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that on the outside I became another person. But on the inside? Nothing had really changed. I was still quiet and shy and preferred my own company, and it’s hard to imagine that the results of plastic surgery would be any different.

The idea of changing our bodies in accordance with popular fads reminds me of the 1931 book Black No More by George Schyuler. In it, a doctor develops a treatment that makes black people become “white,” utterly removing their ethnicity. For a while everything is fine—most black people receive the treatment and experience life without prejudice. But in the last chapter it’s realized that they’ve become truly white, while people who are primarily caucasian are actually lots of shades other than white—“pale pink shading down to a sand color and a red.” And, of course, a whole new system of racial oppression is invented, this time focused on people with skin that’s too light.

The moral of that particular story, I think, is that we are who we are. It’s how the world works that we need to change to find happiness, not ourselves.

Read More

• New American Media, “Pretty in Plastic: Kpop and Korea’s Plastic Surgery Boom”
• Lipgloss Love Affair: “Korean Plastic Surgery and Body Lines Explained”
• Chienna, “Top 6 Scariest Plastic Surgery Procedures”
• CNN.com, “Welcome to the Plastic Surgery Capital of the World”
• GlobalPost, “Whatever Happened to the Korean Wave?”
• The Grand Narrative, “Korean Sociological Image #3: From Asian to Caucasian” and “Response from a Reader”
• Famous Magazine, “Korean Plastic Surgery Before and After” (The most upsetting thing you will see today. I promise.)

(1/24/13: A new discovery over at Soompi. Gee. I wonder if all the plastic surgery the older celebrities have had has something to do with their perceived ages.)