Beauty culture in South Korea reveals a grim future in 'Flawless'

It's Been a Minute

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🗓️ 23 May 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Author and one of NPR's beloved hosts, Elise Hu, joins Brittany Luse to talk about her new book: Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. For Elise, what started as a professional move to Seoul turned into a long-term interest in beauty culture and the societal demand to look flawless. Elise and Brittany talk about the high price of South Korea's lookism, how the government props up beauty culture, the technological gaze, and how Korean beauty culture is spreading throughout the United States.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	At least I could say welcome to its bin a minute but it makes more sense to say welcome back to its bin a minute because you've
0:07.0	posted the show before or something time. I'm glad to be back. It has been a minute though. I know you're joining us today as a guest.
0:14.2	It's so weird. Is it really that weird?
0:17.0	Hey there. You're listening to its bin a minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Loose.
0:25.0	And if you've been with IBAM for a while, you probably recognize that voice. It's Elise Hugh.
0:32.1	One of the absolutely stellar guest hosts on its bin a minute. But what you might not know about her is that she set up NPR's
0:39.6	Japan Korea Bureau in Seoul, South Korea where she was an international correspondent. A pretty busy time for
0:47.2	geopolitics and a lot of missile provocations from North Korea. And then Trump got elected in 2016 and then
0:53.6	there was all this. My nuclear button is bigger than your nuclear button talk with Kim Jong-un. And while that definitely
1:02.0	took a lot of her focus, there was something else that really stuck with her. Beauty was everywhere. And I'm not talking about
1:11.2	nature or even anything natural. I saw so many before and after signs and so many advertisements of what to look like and
1:19.6	skin care places and face shops across from face shops and across from face shops. A few years later, she found she was
1:26.4	still thinking about Korea's vision of beauty. So she wrote a book. It came out this week.
1:33.1	Flaless. Lessons in looks and culture from the K Beauty Capital. It's a deeply researched peak into how the
1:39.8	Korean beauty market has become something of a global superpower. This book is mind blowing to say the least.
1:46.2	But many of its revelations hit a little closer to home than Americans might realize.
1:52.2	Coming up, Elise peels back the dewy layer of K Beauty and reveals the algorithms lurking right under the surface.
2:04.8	So you ended up turning your attention in this book to the beauty standards that exist in Korea and how these
2:09.6	standards have kind of created a lens through which K Beauty has taken over the beauty industry.
2:14.8	And it's interesting is I was reading the book. I noticed for the first time just how many Korean beauty products I use in everyday life.
2:23.7	Exactly. And it's a cultural story too because Korea very deliberately since the late 90s early odds has
2:31.0	sought this soft power strategy that I detail in the book, the spread of how you, which is the Korean cultural wave.
	...

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