Imagine living in a world where mirrors are everywhere: subways covered in them, full-length ones before you step into your lecture hall, reflective elevators. No more quick shameless checking yourself out in your smartphone’s camera to see if you’ve got anything in your teeth. No hair out of place. No zipper down. No makeup smudged. Just look to your left or right for the nearest mirror. 

“It’s a narcissist’s dream,” Danielle Salangsang uttered in a trendy cafe in Seoul. 

Danielle is a 20-year-old UC Santa Barbara student who is double majoring in East Asian studies and Communication. She is currently studying abroad at Yonsei University; one of three prestigious universities in South Korea. 

A charcoal turtleneck shields her from 40-degree weather that might sneak its way into Beansbins Coffee. The cafe matches Danielle’s simple, geometric aesthetic that I’ve been acquainted with for the two years we were roommates. Although she would probably play indie R&B if I personified a cafe as Danielle, the typical jazz soundtrack that serves as her background would do. 

She swirls around her iced americano which she lets me know is South Korea’s national coffee and that’s when a small light bulb appears above her head. She tells me that ever since she’s arrived in Seoul, she’s been noticing the number of mirrors plastered around the city.

So yes, whether you think the imagined world previously described is dystopian or utopian, it does actually exist. It exists in South Korea.

The mirrors, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. What really lies beneath a society with an obsession with appearances is problematic beauty standards that infiltrate daily Korean life — that now infiltrate Danielle’s daily life. 

These standards would include having a V-shaped jawline, small nose, small face, fair to pale skin, double eyelids, small lips, porcelain skin, and a tiny waist. The issue for anyone living in that society is that not everyone is born with all or any of those features. In fact, Gallup Korea has estimated that one in three women aged 19 to 29 has gotten plastic surgery — the most popular being blepharoplasty which is also known as double-eyelid surgery. Danielle notes that surgery is so common many young women receive cosmetic surgery as a graduation gift.

But what place do Korean beauty standards have in the world of an American study abroad student? The standards seem to create ostracization. Her appearance acts as a barrier between Korean natives and her personality. This barrier seems indestructible like something they could never get over. She’s constantly stared down riding the subway, at restaurants, and in stores. It’s as if she’s performing a circus act just by walking around normally. 

So what does she look like? Danielle is a 5’3, medium-skinned Filipina with a curvy figure. Her full lips are her star feature and her black hair sits nicely a few inches above her waist. In America, she feels like she blends in. Nothing about her is out of the ordinary but in South Korea, almost everything about her seems extraordinarily loud.

Beginning with her nationality, being an American plays a key role in her experience abroad. It makes her feel like even more of a foreigner and compels her to be self-aware of her Americaness, “because we’re foreigners they’re never going to consider us them. We’re just on a different plane”. It also discourages her from interacting with natives especially at restaurants, “The really authentic looking restaurants - I feel like they just won’t like you know, serve me like they would a Korean person. It’s a real big barrier for me to be able to eat what I wanna eat but at the same time, I’m one: scared of ordering. Two: are they gonna treat me nicely? Three: are they gonna rip me off because I’m a foreigner and I don’t know any better?”. 

This fear isn’t something she imagines would happen but rather stemmed from an actual incident of mistreatment, “There was this one time, I was with my friends. We were trying to go to this specific cafe for this dessert and so, I tried to order that specific dessert so all of us could share and there are like two other parties in the cafe that are eating that same dessert so I asked for the dessert and they were like ‘Oh we don’t make that anymore’. I was like ‘Okay’. So we all left but we were seeing two other parties with the same dessert…so there are times where the discrimination is real real. Like they really did that. If that was America, that would be a lawsuit”. 

“Dirty Asian” is a derogatory term for darker-skinned Asians and here and there, I’ve heard Danielle use it to refer to her Filipina identity. Her medium skin color is rare in Korea and the cosmetic markets don’t make it any easier for her to cope with the stark differences between her skin color and what seems like everyone else in Korea’s skin color. This is because Korean cosmetics center around “natural” looking makeup and for these companies, “natural” does not include anything darker than white skin. The foundation range is not very big. Danielle puts it this way, “the shades go from porcelain to porcelain”. When cosmetic companies do decide to offer foundations for people of darker skin tones, they offer very few colors. In summary, the foundations usually found in Korean beauty markets only represent polar ends of the shade spectrum but nothing for any girls like Danielle in between, “In terms of cosmetics, I could never. There’s no way for me to find a foundation with my skin tone that isn’t way too dark and I’m not even that dark as a brown girl”.

I then asked Danielle if she thinks misogyny plays a part in the beauty standards and she agrees. She talks about Confucius countries placing a higher value on men over women and how women have 3 important men in their lives: their father, their husband, and their son, “They [themselves] are not the center of their lives”. Consequently, they aren’t dressing up for themselves but for men and now with the growth of social media, for society and the world. 

She emphasizes that old values like misogyny are still strongly intact but the value of conformity is the most abused. “That’s what is making it stay the same - no one wants to stand out unless you’re bold”. Though, Danielle does point out she thinks South Korea is slowly changing and becoming more accepting. 

One way Korean beauty is transforming is through the first signs of a body positivity movement. Danielle follows a body positivity Instagram, @jstyle_evellet, that features plus-size Asian models and supports self-love for all body types. Other than this effort, she doesn’t see anything else changing yet. 

The sizing in Korean stores is still the same and still discouraging. She’s had to buy a size up which doesn’t sound too bad but it takes a psychological toll. Not being skinny is a flaw in many societies but unlike America where certain stores have adopted vanity sizing, many South Korean clothing stores support one size fits all. The issue with that particular size is that “one size fits all” typically means “one size fits what society says is the norm”. To Danielle, she estimates that it fits extra small to small or 00 to 0. Even if sizes are branded as small, medium, and large, she still feels like there is a micro-sized discrepancy between the sizes. 

Although Danielle may be accepting of her body type, her body is what she is most insecure about. “One thing that I really have to point out that makes me kind of insecure,” Danielle pauses for a brief moment to think and then continues, “is just my body size and how it looks compared to everyone else’s. Because like I’m more on the curvy side even though I’m not that extremely curvy. Everyone here is kind of like pencil-shaped so I feel like especially when I wear my skinny jeans - it’s so prominent. You can’t miss it. Part of me is just so used to American Standards - thick is good. Here in Korea, it’s not necessarily that same notion”. This also isolates her because there isn’t a diversity of body shapes in South Korea, “You really don’t see fat people here. I would say like one or two out of ten people are considered overweight. But still, even in that sense if you put these quote on quote overweight people here in the American context they’re still pretty healthy-looking; they’re still on the smaller side”. 

Despite toxic beauty standards, Danielle tries to remain confident and practice self-love. She does this by adopting a positive attitude, “I just tell myself you might not look like all the other Korean girls but you’re different and that’s what you can offer”. While harmful beauty aspirations plague every society, Danielle doesn’t let American or Korean standards change the way she thinks of herself and she most definitely does not feel urged to conform either, “Maybe if I were in middle school I would be like ‘Oh I’m gonna work out’ and like you know, be them. But no. I’m me. I’m not gonna change me just because I’m living in a different society”.