It was during the dog days of winter in 2009 that the realities of plastic surgery in my adopted home of South Korea finally hit home.
. I was sitting with a friend in a small park in the southern city of Gwangju when a mother of two middle school students told us why she was uprooting her family and taking them thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean to “somewhere in Canada”.
The woman, in her mid-thirties, was working as a receptionist at her husband’s small car mechanic shop in the suburbs. Her conversational English was improving gradually because of her volunteer work at a Christian church across town that was popular with many of the non-Korean nationals living in the city. Her son and daughter both spoke good English, as is common among children of their age, but her husband had nothing beyond ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. Despite this, there was optimism he could find employment in Vancouver or Toronto doing the same job.
The mechanic’s wife had come to the conclusion that her 14-year-old daughter would not get a good job in South Korea, irrespective of her academic grades, “because she is too ugly”. There were only two solutions this mother could see: extensive plastic surgery, or emigration. The family quietly slipped out of the country in the spring of 2010 and that was the last we ever heard of them.
Naturally, the sheer size of the plastic surgery industry only becomes apparent when you come to Seoul. The capital’s top surgeries spend hundreds of thousands of euro a year decking out the city’s impressive subway system with advertisements for their clinics. Older women have been seen applauding those enormous posters that adorn the station walls. Multiple ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures show a girl in her early 20s looking sheepish and depressed before being transformed into a smiling beauty worthy of a job in a top Seoul firm.
The interesting thing about these plastic surgery ads is the accessibility of the surgeons. They are often pictured next to the ‘reborn’ women, standing as a team in long white coats and blue uniforms. Their KakaoTalk IDs (for the mobile messaging application similar to WhatsApp) are printed below, allowing women the ability to send instant messages to the surgeon’s cell-phone.
And there’s more. A free app called ‘Plastic Surgery Estimate’ gives potential cosmetic surgery patients the total sum for their reconstruction requirements, and what areas of their face and head need to be addressed. The process is simple: take a close-up picture of your face, upload it via the app, and within 30 seconds the results are displayed, detailing how much the entire procedure will cost and a list of your head’s offending areas. After uploading my own photo, the app told me that I require nose, jaw and chin reconstruction. My face, if this app is to be believed, needs 31 million won worth of surgery – a staggering €21,000.
While most of us can find the funny side of such phone gimmicks, the reality is thousands of South Korean people, especially girls, are looking at those figures and opting to change their lives.
There are few moments more surreal than standing on a packed subway next to women with a mask over her lower face attempting, without much success, to disguise the plastic casing protecting her recently redrawn nose. Or the woman with the sun visor shielding the white plaster from her forehead surgery.
If you want that job, or the rich husband, too often a scalpel is seen as your only hope. Like the mechanic’s daughter in Gwangju, it appears there is no place in modern South Korea for an ‘ugly’ person.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
