​Finding The "Right" Face

Plastic surgery in Korea is as normal as wearing makeup or getting your hair cut, even if you have not had an operation. In the past, it was a rather clandestine affair with mothers covertly taking their daughters in for face re-sculpting before presenting them to potential suitors.

Studies in Korea typically position cosmetic surgery as conformity to patriarchal versions of femininity in order to maximize women’s chances of success in marriage and the economy. (Joanna Elfving-Hwang, 2012) In addition, to a certain extent, cosmetic surgery enables these cultural ideals to become a reality.

Today’s bear-women must undergo the pain of dieting and plastic surgery in order to become beautiful women with bodies that are considered normal and socially acceptable. According to a survey in 2009 by market research firm Trend Monitor, one in every five women in Seoul between the ages of 19 and 49 admitted to going under the knife. This makes you come to a startling realization the longer you spend in Korea.

The social pressure in South Korea to look good is unbelievable. And if you’re not satisfied with your new face, you can always get calf reduction surgery to top it off. These days, without these routine procedures, you will find yourself hard-pressed to get a date or even a job. It’s become an unspoken requirement in both professional and personal realms. While the Korean community is vocal and makes no qualms about its fixation on surgery, what is not as prominent is an open forum discussing the consequences of such procedures, both physically and mentally.

Having a ‘lucky face’, ‘right face’ or ‘best face’ reduces the ‘risk’ of leaving an unfavourable impression and can be of great importance in many practical ways.  The ‘right face’ can be an important factor in marriage. For instance, Korean physiognomy has traditionally characterized round eyes for women as suggesting lasciviousness, yet round eyes are currently desirable. Hence, people now are pursuing round and double-eyelid eyes.  The most common surgery in South Korea is ssankapul, literally meaning “eyelids”.  For 2.3 million won, or about $2,000 US, this procedure is so commonplace that it’s not even considered surgery. Ssankapul is double-eyelid surgery, called so after the crease in the eyes that most Koreans lack.



Figure 1. Double-eyelid eyes surgery process

One more example is a large ‘moon face’ has historically connoted fertility and therefore value for women, yet women are now having their faces narrowed, which can be seen from picture below.

Figure 2. "Right face" in today's society

The ‘right face’ can also be a determining factor in gaining employment in a Korean job market where nearly 80 per cent of young people now attend further education college or university, and this is an issue of great importance for both men and women. (Joanna Elfving-Hwang, 2012). For example, since a photograph is a requirement of all job applications, and physiognomy is often used to evaluate candidates where qualifications and experience are equal, an employee with ‘friendly’ facial features will always be preferred, given the importance of social bonding in the workplace.



New cable TV program "Let Me In", which started airing on Dec. 2, chooses patients out of a pool of thousands of applicants who feel self-conscious about certain body parts or have health issues and offers them plastic surgery at no cost. “Me-in” means a beauty in Korean. As a result, they are reborn as completely different people, most of them made over not only on the parts they requested to change, but also on other areas of their body.

The Choice of Gender



In recent days, Thailand’s transgender community has surfaced in media reports, covering topics ranging from an offensive IKEA advertisement to a political campaign aimed at the untapped “kathoey” (male-to-female) voting bloc. ‘‘MTF transsexuals and cosmetic surgeries are the two things that go together."(AREN Z. AIZURA, 2009). From the website sexchangecenter.com, the company provide some transsexual surgeries which can be seen in the picture below.

​Figure 3. Thailand transgender surgery website

The website design makes an explicit connection between feminising physical surgical procedures and Thai feminine beauty. The transsexuals and cosmetic surgeries go together, might be read by those English-speaking readers as expressing the familiar logic that a transsexual woman’s sense of embodied completeness is only accomplished through genital reassignment surgery.



From the past to now, there is a significant number of Thais perceive kathoeys as belonging to a third gender, including many kathoeys themselves, others see them as either a kind of man or a kind of woman. Some American and European (and white) trans women, even travelling to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery not only represents corporeal feminisation through the cut of the surgeon’s knife, but also means coming into contact with a desirable and emulatable ideal of ‘‘traditional’’ Thai femininity.



This association between the Thai iconicity of feminine ‘‘grace and beauty’’ and self-transformation was a pervasive pattern of affective experience for Euro-American transgender medical tourists. Melanie( a trans woman from the Midwestern United States) and other non-Thai trans women experienced Thailand not only as the site of their reassignment surgeries, but as a geocultural space that enabled them to supplement their own sense of psychic feminisation. Melanie narrated this experience of psychic feminisation as an effect of her understandings of the greater importance of ‘‘proper’’ feminine beauty within Thai culture: grace and beauty were, she said, much more important in Thailand than in America.



The idea that desirable Thai trans feminine beauty may be accomplished through cosmetic or aesthetic surgeries can be found not only at the level of representation on hospital marketing websites, but also within a constellation of Thai gender variant social practices. The nationally televised kathoey beauty pageants such as Miss Tiffany Universe, Miss International Queen and Miss Alcazar Purple Crown all feature contestants for whom facial cosmetic surgeries are par for the course (Wong, 2005, p. 7; Saniotis, 2007).



Fake Breast and Power

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Fake Breasts have almost become ‘branded’ items and a symbol of economic status in the hierarchies of modern community because they are expensive to acquire. Breast implants cost between $5,000 and $10,000 depending on where the clinic is based. This is a large amount of money for young women who earn on average between $1,800 and $2,500 monthly in a full time job, and much less if they work part-time. As such, possessing fake breasts thus marks the owner as economically successful, hence there is a desire for women to look artificially big-breasted.

Some females also wanted their new breasts to be obviously surgically enhanced in order to mark themselves off from both naturally big breasted women, and smaller breasted women who had not had surgery, and so signify to others that they are a particular kind of ‘woman’. Basically, female patient who had such point of view, pursue for wealthier economic status and show it through their fake breasts, which signify their "brands" and thus, alleviate their economic status as compared to female who have natural-size of breasts.

Self-Independence