South Korean Parents Are Making Their Kids Get Plastic Surgery As I’m sure you’ll know by now, plastic surgery is a pretty big deal in South Korea. Remember last week when those photos popped up of all the South Korean beauty-pageant contestants who looked exactly the same? Everyone was all, “Hey, those guys sure do love their surgery,” with a brief chuckle, before moving on to autotuned Charles Ramsey videos and forgetting about the whole thing. Then, of course, the internet lost itsshit in a monsoon of moral outrage and started to scrutinize why Korean girls are trying to look more Western and how awful that all is.       I decided to call up my girl Sparkles (not her real name), who recently returned to live in her home city of Seoul, to find out what the reaction there was like to all this commotion. Turns out the plastic surgery trend has already become a running joke, with girls laughing about the fact they probably all have the same doctor and teasing each other about not having their eyelids torn apart enough.   She also told me something else slightly worrying. Parents are pressuring their daughters into having cosmetic procedures. It all starts to get a little dark when weapons-grade stage moms are guilt-tripping their daughters into splicing up their faces. Anyway, here’s that chat. VICE: What’s the surgery scene like nowadays?Sparkles: We have trends, like to tear the inner corner of the eye so it’s more almond shaped. Or, for a while, it was liposuction and putting that fat into your forehead. It’s hard to say if they’re conforming to a Western ideal of beauty, though—no one will take a photo of a caucasian celebrity to the surgeon and ask for that. That idea may have started off only because white people generally have taller noses and larger eyes, so it’s easy to describe it as a Western look, but no one in Korea will say they want to look Western. In Korea, we call doing your eyes and nose the “basics.” They’re the standard procedures. That sounds like you’re ordering a burger; “I’ll just get the basics, thanks.”Yeah. Like, “Oh, you haven’t even gotten plastic surgery yet? You should get the basics!” That’s nothing. So many people do it that it’s got to the point where people say things like, “But you only got your eyes and your nose done, it’s not a big deal.”  Continue

South Korean Parents Are Making Their Kids Get Plastic Surgery

As I’m sure you’ll know by now, plastic surgery is a pretty big deal in South Korea. Remember last week when those photos popped up of all the South Korean beauty-pageant contestants who looked exactly the same? Everyone was all, “Hey, those guys sure do love their surgery,” with a brief chuckle, before moving on to autotuned Charles Ramsey videos and forgetting about the whole thing. Then, of course, the internet lost itsshit in a monsoon of moral outrage and started to scrutinize why Korean girls are trying to look more Western and how awful that all is.      

I decided to call up my girl Sparkles (not her real name), who recently returned to live in her home city of Seoul, to find out what the reaction there was like to all this commotion. Turns out the plastic surgery trend has already become a running joke, with girls laughing about the fact they probably all have the same doctor and teasing each other about not having their eyelids torn apart enough.  

She also told me something else slightly worrying. Parents are pressuring their daughters into having cosmetic procedures. It all starts to get a little dark when weapons-grade stage moms are guilt-tripping their daughters into splicing up their faces. Anyway, here’s that chat.

VICE: What’s the surgery scene like nowadays?
Sparkles: We have trends, like to tear the inner corner of the eye so it’s more almond shaped. Or, for a while, it was liposuction and putting that fat into your forehead. It’s hard to say if they’re conforming to a Western ideal of beauty, though—no one will take a photo of a caucasian celebrity to the surgeon and ask for that. That idea may have started off only because white people generally have taller noses and larger eyes, so it’s easy to describe it as a Western look, but no one in Korea will say they want to look Western. In Korea, we call doing your eyes and nose the “basics.” They’re the standard procedures.

That sounds like you’re ordering a burger; “I’ll just get the basics, thanks.”
Yeah. Like, “Oh, you haven’t even gotten plastic surgery yet? You should get the basics!” That’s nothing. So many people do it that it’s got to the point where people say things like, “But you only got your eyes and your nose done, it’s not a big deal.” 

Continue

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in Plastic Surgery South Korea the basics beauty
North Korea Is Open for Business (Sort of) - The Hermit Kingdom Wants Unity and Peace with South Korea If North Korea didn’t exist, all those Kremlinolgists who were made redundant at the end of the Cold War would be lost without a trail of mystic socialist smoke-signals to semi-religiously divine meaning from. But luckily it does—Hooray!—so for now at least we can keep staring deep into Kim Jong Un’s pudgy, crystal-ball shaped head and continue second-guessing the obscure intentions of the eccentric, autocratic regime that built its people a world-class dolphinarium before it gave them a decent set of roads.

 Yesterday Kim, now the world’s youngest leader, broke the silent tradition of his reclusive father and made a New Year’s speech to the people of North Korea, filling them in on his plans for a totally awesome 2013. It was the first time the country has been addressed directly by one of its autocratic czars in almost 20 years, and it seems the gesture was appreciated. The country’s recent rocket launch on December 12 captured the imaginations of the global media and gave North Korean morale an interstellar boost. Despite rumors that the satellite, after making it into orbit, hasn’t been functioning, Kim still felt emboldened enough to let the metaphor of space exploration underscore his rhetoric for a year of new frontiers back here on Earth.
 He even gave 2013 a long and clumsy space-themed slogan: “Let us bring about a radical turn in the building of an economic giant with the same spirit and mettle as we displayed in conquering space!” Now, not to be a party pooper or anything, but it took China two decades to turn around its backward peasant economy into the global economic powerhouse it is today, so as North Korea analyst Stephen Haggard pointed out, any talk of miraculously becoming the next Hong Kong, Singapore, or *whisper it* South Korea in just one year is little more than the excited talk of an overly enthusiastic young man whose dad gave him the keys to a clapped-out old banger of a nation before he’d even learned how to drive.

 Continue

North Korea Is Open for Business (Sort of) - The Hermit Kingdom Wants Unity and Peace with South Korea

If North Korea didn’t exist, all those Kremlinolgists who were made redundant at the end of the Cold War would be lost without a trail of mystic socialist smoke-signals to semi-religiously divine meaning from. But luckily it does—Hooray!—so for now at least we can keep staring deep into Kim Jong Un’s pudgy, crystal-ball shaped head and continue second-guessing the obscure intentions of the eccentric, autocratic regime that built its people a world-class dolphinarium before it gave them a decent set of roads.



Yesterday Kim, now the world’s youngest leader, broke the silent tradition of his reclusive father and made a New Year’s speech to the people of North Korea, filling them in on his plans for a totally awesome 2013. It was the first time the country has been addressed directly by one of its autocratic czars in almost 20 years, and it seems the gesture was appreciated. The country’s recent rocket launch on December 12 captured the imaginations of the global media and gave North Korean morale an interstellar boost. Despite rumors that the satellite, after making it into orbit, hasn’t been functioning, Kim still felt emboldened enough to let the metaphor of space exploration underscore his rhetoric for a year of new frontiers back here on Earth.


He even gave 2013 a long and clumsy space-themed slogan: “Let us bring about a radical turn in the building of an economic giant with the same spirit and mettle as we displayed in conquering space!” Now, not to be a party pooper or anything, but it took China two decades to turn around its backward peasant economy into the global economic powerhouse it is today, so as North Korea analyst Stephen Haggard pointed out, any talk of miraculously becoming the next Hong Kong, Singapore, or *whisper it* South Korea in just one year is little more than the excited talk of an overly enthusiastic young man whose dad gave him the keys to a clapped-out old banger of a nation before he’d even learned how to drive.



Continue

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in North Korea South Korea Korea Kim Jong Un News