Kim’s Plastic Surgery Will Make You Happy-Pretty!
It’s widely known that Korean has the world’s highest rate of plastic surgery. Seeing ads on subway for breast augmentation using emoticons is far from uncommon.
However, the ad above takes the cake for being the most tasteless. It’s enormous and sends the wrong message in an increasingly (and already) image-conscious country.
When I first saw the ad, I took the message as, if you get plastic surgery, you will become a bigger, brighter diamond. However, most of my friends saw it as something more akin to, “if you get plastic surgery, you will get a bigger diamond because you are more beautiful!”
On second thought, I think my friends were right. Either way, it’s kind of sad.
Anyway, a fellow middle school teacher in Incheon has an interesting blog post about Korean plastic surgery after discovering one of her students got the very popular eye-widening surgery:
One of my students recently had plastic surgery…She’s 16 here, so 14 or 15 in the U.S.–9th grade. She’s one of the “lucky” ones, because her mother works in a hospital..[S]he had her eyelids lifted this summer, and will finish the procedure this winter.
The eyelid-lift is so common in this country (to widen the eyes), that most girls don’t even consider this $800 procedure plastic surgery.
About The Author
John P. Gamboa
John is a Technical Success Manager at WP Engine. Before moving to Austin, John lived in South Korea and China for the better part of four years. His life as an amateur Chinese web censorship expert, traveler, map nerd and beer geek can be found on this site.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
thanks for the recommendation, i’m flattered
also, i reacted the same way you did–taking the sign as “you’ll be prettier.” but since views of marriage are very similar to a business deal in some ways, the latter view makes a lot of sense, and is sending me reeling a little.