In a new column for Highsnobiety, writer Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.
A few months ago, I found myself in the hot seat at Bryant Park’s preeminent “K-aesthetics” medical spa, lured by the opportunity to try South Korea’s hottest new neurotoxin. “It’s all I use in my practice now,” Dr. Darby Koh says, loading up my jaw muscles with 40 CCs of Letybo.
As a longtime clencher, I’ve only sought out this kind of silver bullet a handful of times. Along with tension relief, the added purported benefit of masseter muscle Botox (as it’s more commonly known) is visual slimming of the face. I picture an Animorphs-style transformation: a LEGO-headed girlboss shifting back into her natural delicate form.
Non-invasive injectables are fast becoming a maintenance staple, along with biannual dental cleanings and highlight touch-ups. Not too long ago, a frozen face was ridiculed as vanity’s folly. Now, it seems like every third forehead I see belonging to a woman in her early 30s is suspiciously smooth and shiny. That might have something to do with the med spa franchises popping up in every major city. And that might be the result of appearance inflation wrought by our screen-integrated world. If you’ve been on social media in the past year, you’ve likely been scrolling endless chatter about which celebrities look mysteriously refreshed, more youthful, lifted. See: the 70-year-old Kris Jenner looking closer in age to her oldest daughters, or Lindsay Lohan returning to the spotlight looking agelessly taut.
Perhaps most “hmm” to me lately was Emma Stone’s alleged upper blepharoplasty and/or brow lift, which made our former hooded eyelid queen appear much more… alert, shall we say. In a viral Substack post, the anonymous writer described the situation as: “thirty-six year old Hollywood crone Emma Stone recently got her face snatched so tight that she’s now twinning with OG Iron Chef chairman Takeshi Kaga,” followed by an image of Stone next to one of K-pop star Lalisa Manoban, captioned, “the first successful woman-to-woman asian transfusion. science is so beautiful.” It’s not the first piece of content I’ve seen snarking on Stone for adopting an Eastern appearance. (It’s not even Stone’s first rodeo in similar race-related discourse; she was cast as a white-passing, half-Asian character in the 2015 movie Aloha.)
Both my Letybo and Emma Stone’s alleged “bleph” are the latest examples of how Western beauty has imported ingredients, procedures, and expertise from the East, particularly South Korea, in the recent decade. Like the ancient trade routes, hype trickles over to the West often years after the fact — or after FDA approval, in the case of my Letybo. As for the blephs that supposedly make people look Asian by way of lifting the eyes upward and outward, that cultural import is especially paradoxical, considering blepharoplasty’s complicated history. During the Korean War, American GI plastic surgeon Dr. David Ralph Millard developed and performed what’s more casually known as double-eyelid surgery on Korean war brides, sex workers, and translators to create a more “occidental,” or scrutable, appearance. (“Slanted” eyes were considered a sign of illegible stoicism or deviance.) Now, a surgery developed and perfected on Asian faces is (allegedly) being used to brighten and zhuzh famous Caucasian faces. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the bleph has ranked among the top five most sought-after aesthetic procedures for the past three years.
From a global point of view, it makes sense that beauty is one of South Korea’s main exports. The country is so collectively dedicated to being hot that its government heavily subsidizes the K-beauty industry as an economic driver of soft power. This has worked so well that I see sheet masks in the check-out aisle of every CVS and Sephora. Ten-step skincare routines have dominated YouTube and our medicine cabinets since the mid-2010s, and Korean beauty brands are heaped alongside American and European brands on shelves. Their affordability and efficacy have largely shifted an industry that once relied on price exclusivity and scarcity. Put plainly, Asian beauty products are way cheaper than US-made or European-made products, and that shit works.
Does that make it accurate to say that South Korean or Eastern beauty ideals are becoming predominant? Not exactly, although these trends all have their moments on the clock app. I doubt we’re all going to adopt pale skin, tiny heart-shaped faces, and a youthful, doll-like appearance as the new Western, or at least American, standard. But I’m seeing so many beauty content creators post about “drinking your collagen,” glass-skin teas made with herbs and fruits from TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) recipes, qi-gong practices to help drain the lymphatic system, and black sesame paste recipes for hormonal balance and to reverse hair graying. A lot of these content creators are of Asian descent, but the avatars commenting “JUJUBE” to find out where to buy tremella fungus so they can achieve mochi skin largely are not. If you’ve ever been made fun of for bringing gimbap or dimsum leftovers to school for lunch, I’m sure you, too, will find this incredibly ironic. The TikTok ban psych-out that drew Americans to Xiaohongshu (a.k.a. Red Note, China’s major social media equivalent) introduced a kind of neo-orientalism that cast an aspirational eye on Asia’s advancements in fashion, technology, and, of course, beauty and wellness. Proliferated through the algorithm’s inescapable current, it was only a matter of time for this too become commodified for our consumption.
Beauty standards have historically operated as a means of racial and class exclusivity — specifically upholding white, Eurocentric features. In our hyper-connected world, the introduction of a neoliberal multiculturalism allows us to dabble in new pinnacles of ethnic features: high cheekbones, full lips, a curvaceous hip-to-waist ratio, and, of course, youthful, plump, clear skin. Being considered pretty is one of the few privileges you don’t have to be born into. Instead, you can spend time and money (and money and money) until you get there. So, beauty becomes an asset that allows us social and economic mobility in ways that have powerful impacts on what becomes aspirational, let alone ideal, in our culture.
The ongoing hallyu — that is, South Korea’s increasing impact on pop culture — has further established Korean-ness, and more broadly, a vague Eastern-ness, as a bankable cultural import. I never would’ve thought it would be cool or ideal to be Asian in America when I was growing up. When Chinese character graphics, satin qipao-styled tops, and chopsticks as hair accessories came into style when I was in high school in the early aughts, that might’ve been the moment. But in practice, my participation invited caricatured commentary, even while shiny takeout box-style purses in Delia’s catalogs reigned supreme. Chinoiserie giveth, and Chinoiserie taketh away.
But I don’t think most of the Western world adopts other cultural practices or aesthetics with any kind of awareness. Usually, that adoption looks like decontextualized imitation — or sheer novelty. When I see beauty trends like the #foxeyechallenge pop off on social media, with no acknowledgement of the cultural significance of pulling one’s eyelids upward and outward, or when Skims releases its Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap, a sort of compression wrap for the jaw, while Japanese and Korean convenience stores have been slinging all kinds of jaw-slimming contraptions for years, a strange dissonance occurs. Jade rollers, ear seeding, gua sha sculpting, and even color analysis have made their way into beauty and wellness routine absorption and cultural literacy only at a superficial level. One suspects that most TikTokers scraping a gua sha stone across their faces are not educated practitioners of TCM.
It’s not that it’s now aspirational to be or look Asian. It’s more that Asian culture is so dedicated to beauty labor that the blueprint is easy to follow. (The “morning shed” TikToks always make me think of this.) And while South Korea’s great beauty movement was originally in pursuit of national pride, it has become synonymous with individual empowerment — something we know all about in the West. Global transference goes both ways in that regard.
American beauty, similar to American power, may be experiencing a bit of comparison anxiety when it comes to global supremacy. We can only keep up as fast as our infrastructure can accommodate. It’s not that everyone will soon have access to the Kris Jenner facelift package, but that — with enough influence and innovation from nimble Eastern beauty markets — a lifetime of dedication can stave off the eventual “need” for one.
My takeaway from the great beauty boom that followed the introduction of mobile social media is that our ideals are elastic and often polarized: bushy brows vs. thin brows, big butts vs. small ones, Instagram Face vs. baby Botox. We’re currently indexing an era of subtle, “natural-looking” tweaks that aim to obscure the passage of time. The East vs. West paradigm is a distraction from the ways they reinforce the impossible for one another. The one thing modern global beauty ideals agree on is that you can look like a lot of things, but not your age. Aesthetic variety and individualism offer us a generous spectrum of acceptable ways to appear, but one thing remains true: Aging gracefully looks a lot like not aging at all.
Four weeks after my Letybo injections, I returned to Dr. Koh’s practice for a check-in. “Oh wow!” she says, gently cupping my jaw in her hands and feeling the plushy give of my neutralized masseter muscles. “You have much more of a V-line now. Very Korean. Did we do your forehead too?” I say something about how I prefer for people to know when I’m mad at them. She replies: “Well, it’s up to you.”
