Elise Hu's 'Flawless,' a deep dive into Korean beauty industry

During one particularly dire stretch of the pandemic, I gave up on washing my hair. What was the point? There was no one to see or smell me, save for my then-and-understandably-no-longer partner, who had already witnessed me in my most feral state. My refusal was not a courageous protest targeting beauty norms but a measure of my isolation. To my surprise, I found I missed primping and prettifying, which were part and parcel of the privilege of being looked at by other people. At the same time, my descent into unkempt abandon was undeniably liberating. “The pandemic offered a rare opportunity for people to switch the script,” writes journalist Elise Hu in “Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital.” “We stopped wearing makeup because we didn’t want to.”

Hu is well-positioned to understand just how revolutionary a respite from the rigors of beauty can be: From 2015 to 2019, she worked as NPR’s bureau chief in Seoul, where she was bombarded with images of the same eerily perfect face. The “inescapable visage” that beamed at her from so many billboards and advertisements was “milky white, smooth, glowing, with a narrow nose, anime-sized eyes, and a small, delicate jawline that meets at a V.” In conversations with cosmetics manufacturers, plastic surgeons and ordinary Korean women, Hu probes the hegemony of this face — and the lengths to which so many aspirants are compelled to go to instantiate it.

Yet it was in Los Angeles, not Seoul, that she reveled in the reprieve that the pandemic afforded. American women may not openly sport the “full-on Freddy Krueger-style post-op masks” that are so common in the streets of Seoul, but they, too, engage in cosmetic labor, and they, too, experience beauty as a desperate imperative. “Flawless” presents Korea’s formidable beauty industry as an object lesson in more familiar cruelties. Cosmetic culture is more extreme in Seoul than it is in Los Angeles, but the two differ in degree, not in kind.

They also differ in sophistication. By all accounts, South Korea is the most cosmetically advanced country on Earth. Beauty editors estimate that, in part because of the government’s heavy investment in the industry, it is 10 years ahead of its competitors, and its citizens spend “twice as much on skincare products as consumers in the United States, the UK, and France.” Korean shoppers are perhaps the world’s most discerning. Eight out of 10 Korean women in their 20s and 30s use Hwahae, an app that functions like a cosmetics-specific Yelp, to debate the merits of various common ingredients.

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There is a reason Korean women are so adept at hunting down the best products. Most job applications in Korea require headshots: Hu reports that the Ministry of Employment and Labor “once shared a link on Twitter, encouraging job seekers to mind their looks.” Popular matchmaking applications filter users by weight. Koreans of both genders are compelled to beautify — “roughly 13 percent of the world’s skincare products for men” are consumed in the country — but it is women who suffer most from the “appearance-based discrimination” that is so punishing and pervasive. Protesters involved in the #EscapeTheCorset movement, in which an estimated 300,000 women (in a country of 51 million) “visibly rejected appearance ideals,” have been “fired from jobs,” stigmatized by their acquaintances, shunned by their families and even “reportedly assaulted.”

The archetype that these young women refuse to embody is the one that Hu noticed when she first arrived in Seoul. Its exemplar is pale, wide-eyed, eternally youthful and extremely thin (most clothing stores in Korea carry only one size, “free,” the equivalent of a U.S. size 2). Commentators often assume that this ideal is a function of Western cultural imperialism, but in fact it originates closer to home. Lighter complexions, long regarded as the preserve of the leisured classes, have been prized in Korea for centuries, dating back to at least the Gojoseon period (which ended in 108 B.C.). Similarly, writes Hu, the appeal of the eye-widening procedure that “drove plastic surgery industry expansion in the 1990s came from nearby influences, such as the Chinese actress Liu Xue Hua” and the Korean movie star Hwang Shin-Hye. Roughly 50 percent of Koreans are born with double-lidded eyes, and the Koreans who seek surgery for their monolids, or narrower eyes, do not aim to appear Western but to emulate “other East Asians” (emphasis Hu’s).

Whatever the source of the look that has become de rigeur, an enormous amount of what Hu perceptively describes as “appearance work” is required to approximate it. Eating disorders are rampant, and plastic surgery is widespread: “One in four Korean mothers with daughters between the ages of twelve and sixteen have suggested plastic surgery to their daughters.” When Hu browses a popular app that allows users to shop for body modifications, she discovers that the site is offering “a post-Korean SAT promotion for high school graduates.”

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“American plastic surgeons and dermatologists coined the term Snapchat dysmorphia to describe young patients who want cosmetic fixes so they look more like they do in filtered selfies,” Hu writes, but “Korean surgeons said they had been doing this for their patients for years, without pathologizing it as a syndrome.”

The economic costs of all this self-improvement are high — women involved in the #EscapeTheCorset movement have admitted to spending up to $700 a month on beauty products before they broke with mainstream culture — and the emotional costs are no doubt even steeper. Yet, with the exception of a few daring defectors, most women go on exfoliating and moisturizing with military discipline. To some extent, they are hooked by seductive marketing: Hu is admirably honest about how even she, a clear-eyed opponent of “consumer beauty,” is sometimes taken in by its glitzier promises. (During her stint in Seoul, she shelled out for face scrub and foot masks, neither of which changed her life very dramatically.) For the most part, however, Korean women stick to their grueling diets because they are no fools: They understand that conforming to the prevailing standards is a rational response to the incentive structure they live and labor under.

An American of Chinese and Taiwanese ancestry, Hu “could simultaneously feel the burden of expectation for Asian women and sometimes escape it.” But her Korean friends were not so lucky. One woman explained that she got jaw surgery because she “didn’t think she really had a choice.” And, Hu laments, she was probably right.

Given Hu’s uncompromising critique of Korean beauty culture, we might expect her to conclude by rejecting “appearance work” completely. But she does no such thing. Instead, she takes a fresher and more interesting tack, reminding us that self-stylization has often served as a form of revolt. In the 1920s and ’30s, Modern Girls, the Korean analogues of American flappers, “cut their hair into bobs” and “ditched traditional clothing,” thereby challenging the way in which “class distinctions in Korean society were represented in women’s clothing and adornments” and embracing “fluidity of identity that they would not have otherwise enjoyed.” Half a century later, when the country’s military dictatorship attempted to expunge visual markers of individuality, women forced to work “in government-issued uniforms cranking out textiles on assembly lines” asserted their autonomy by donning bright makeup.

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But Hu does not retain her faith in beauty solely because of its political potential. She also relishes it for much the same reason that I missed dressing up during the pandemic: because beautification is a source of pleasure in its own right, a means of recognizing that we are seen and of respecting the people who see us. “Flawless” ends on an accordingly ambivalent note. Hu concedes that “body rituals” can be “nurturing and inherently human,” that they can enable “experimentation and expression.” Yet the bulk of her richly researched book reveals the irredeemable shortcomings of the body rituals that are predominant today.

If the #EscapeTheCorset protesters are engaged in “a general strike against aesthetic labor,” as Hu so wisely writes, what exactly are their demands? Most striking laborers do not aim to abolish the workplace but to reform it. How can beauty be rewritten so that it frees rather than fetters? What will women ask for when at last they have a chance to negotiate for better terms?

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

Flawless

Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital

By Elise Hu

Dutton. 372 pp. $29

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