Episode 269: Lessons of K-Beauty with Elise Hu
“Insults can last a lifetime. They really, they become political because they can keep us from showing up and speaking up and sometimes even leaving the house. And so we need to take appearance based discrimination really seriously. “
- Elise Hu
Kate learns you’re supposed to wash your retainer and Doree gets a compliment and a facial on her birthday. Then, Elise Hu, author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, joins them to discuss dining out alone as an act of self-care, how easy it is to get stuck in an algorithm-based echochamber, and the seriousness of appearance-based discrimination.
Photo Credit: Emily Cummings
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Transcript
Kate: Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Kate Spencer.
Doree: And I'm Doree Shafrir.
Kate: And we are not experts.
Doree: We're not, we're two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.
Kate: And look, if you sense a little pep in my voice, it's because I just revealed to Doree before we started recording that I don't really wash my retainer. And Doree was Doree's upset.
Doree: I just like don't even know how to process this. How are you not? My retainer would smell bad. How are you not
Kate: I rinse it.
Doree: Okay. But there's never any weird buildup on it.
Kate: I just haven't Didn't know Again. I just didn't know. I didn't know. But now I do. And now I do. And now I'm going to do it. I am about to turn 44 in July, and I've had retainers before and I never knew I was supposed clean them. Please. Nobody get mad at me. This is one of those moments.
Doree: I'm not mad at you.
Kate: No, not you like listeners. Oh no.
Doree: But I'm also like, how come no one told you this? How come your dentist didn't tell you this?
Kate: When I got my retainer, they just handed it off to me and I just assumed I could rinse it. I just rinse it in the sink. Wa like water? I
Doree: Mean, look, maybe you have some special non cleaning retainer.
Kate: No, no. Doree. I don't. It's just like a plastic mouth guard.
Doree: Okay. Alright. Well, I tried.
Kate: Well, look, hey, this feels like an important topic we have never discussed in the five years of doing this podcast. So if you have thoughts on retainer care, you better hit us up. (781) 591-0390. Leave us a voicemail, send us a text, email us at Forever35podcast@gmail.com. Let's all adults who wear retainers, let's go and look teens too. Let's adults, this teen, whoever's. Let's talk about our retainers. Let's talk
Doree: About this. Wow. Okay. Kate?
Kate: Yes.
Doree: I got a facial yesterday. Well, first of all, yesterday was my birthday.
Kate: Okay, let's set the scene, because I had texted you and I'd been like, are you doing any pampering for your birthday? And you were like, I'm thinking about it.
Doree: I was. And I sort of last minute looked up, could I get a massage somewhere? And I didn't really know where to go. And a lot of places were obviously booked because it was very last minute. But I ended up getting a facial. It was a great facial. I'd never gone to this person before. And with all due respect to Facialists, I do feel like a lot of them are often trying to sell you something.
Kate: We've discussed this before, it's, it adds a level of anxiety to the facial.
Doree: Yes.
Kate: That I hate more than anything in the world.
Doree: Is my skin really that dry or are they just trying to get me to buy this a hundred dollars serum that they happen to sell? You know what I mean?
Kate: Oh, I do know what you mean. And I have been like this. There have been moments in my life where I have stopped getting facials because this would cause me such anxiety at the end of the facial and make it so much more expensive. You've budgeted. You're $150 for the facial.
Doree: Yes, a thousand percent. Oh, okay. So Kate, imagine my surprise when this facialist was like, you have really beautiful skin. And I was like, I'm not shocked. Yeah. I was like, excuse me,
Kate: Excuse. Please repeat that. Come again.
Doree: She said, what do you like do? And I said, honestly. And before I could even get the words out, she was like, you have a really simple routine, don't you,
Kate: Doree?
Doree: And I said, yeah, I do. I use a ton of sunscreen and at night I have a hydrating serum and a moisturizer and that's it. I was like, I went through many years of over exfoliating way too much chemical exfoliation. She's like, yes, people don't understand that stuff is bad. And I was like, but real talk, staying out of the sun is my superpower. And she was like, Ugh, I wish I had known that. She was probably in her, I would say late fifties. And she did not stop talking about how great my skin was. Im sorry to brag!
Kate: Ok, what lovely ego boost, No, no, no, this is,
Doree: but even she was doing the extractions. She was like, you never get pimples, do you? I was like, well, I get some around my period. And she's like, did you ever? And I was like, well, when I was a teenager, I had, and it's funny, as I was saying it, I was like, I had pretty bad acne, but then as I was saying it, I was like, did I actually have pretty bad acne or did I just have hyper focus on my flaws?
Kate: Oh, Doree, this just got deep.
Doree: Right? right.
Kate: Yes. But I think it's the latter. I, for so many, we all have dysmorphic, such dysmorphic, totally relationships with face, totally on hair, all of this.
Doree: So we chatted about, and she was like, I mean, found a couple things to take out and she was doing some extractions. She was like, but you really don't have anything to take out. And I was like, ok, great. And then she finished and she was like, you're glowing. And my s I look, my skin did look good. It looked glowy, it looked healthy. I was just like, you know what it was, I didn't tell her it was my birthday, but it did feel like a real, you're 46 and someone just told you you had really great skin. And I feel like, I don't know, there's some sort of, I feel like there's some sort of life lesson here,
Kate: But what is the life lesson?
Doree: I think the life lesson, first of all is hyper fixation on your flaws on, well, I should say for me, hyper fixation on my flaws was almost crippling, I think
Kate: Did not serve You
Doree: Did not serve me. And I definitely still will hyper fixate on certain things, but I am so much better than I was. And that is just like, it's such a nicer way to live. You know what I mean? Yeah. The other thing is, and this is going to be controversial on a podcast that started as a podcast about skincare, but I really don't know that the vast majority of products, if you have normal skin, I'm not talking about if you have rosacea or melasma or an actual condition that needs to be medically treated. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about if you have relatively normal skin, you probably don't need the vast majority of products.
Kate: I mean, I agree with you.
Doree: You need to slather on sunscreen and wear a fucking hat every time you leave the house. You need to wear sunscreen even when you're going to be indoors all day, because there's still like shit you can get from your compu computer screen.
Kate: I have sunscreen on right now.
Doree: You need to hydrate, you need to have a good moisturizer that you like, preferably fragrance free, and you need to get enough sleep and you need to save your money for doing things like lasers.
Kate: Whoa. You're really coming in hot.
Doree: Im coming In hot.
Kate: You turned 46 and you formed a strong opinion.
Doree: I did form a strong opinion about this.
Kate: You were, you're echoing what Valerie Monroe said to us. She was basically, I use basic shit in my face and then if I'm going to do something, I do like a professional treatment.
Doree: And I heard her, but I didn't fully hear her, and now I fully hear her. So
Kate: I think a retinol is a great, I feel like that is a thing that I am going to, I like having in my skincare routine.
Doree: Well, And if you have a skincare routine you love, then that is wonderful. Keep it
Kate: More power to you. Keep doing it with you. I'm with you. But I just mean, I think a vitamin C serum seems to work. Retinol is pretty proven to be helpful to skin, maybe a hyaluronic acid if you need moisture, everything else is just frosting on the cake. I agree. I agree with you is what I'm saying. I agree with you. Now, I also do want to start, I was looking at this microneedling experience. I do want to get it now. Ultimately, true freedom is not thinking you need any of this shit.
Doree: Of course.
Kate: But I'm going to be very clear. I am not there and I'm probably never going to be there. And I want to jab my face with a bunch of tiny little things and maybe then zap it with a laser.
Doree: I think fun with it. I was talking with another friend about this earlier today, and she was like, yes. This is why it's very frustrating to look at celebrity skin, especially celebrities who have a skincare line and assume that all they're doing is just putting some serums and some creams on their face, because that's not all they're doing.
Kate: No.
Doree: They're getting the skin. They have through more expensive things. So I don't know,
Kate: Professional treatments with a fancy ass derm.
Doree: It doesn't even have to be a fancy ass derm.
Kate: Well, but I mean, that's what the celebs are doing.
Doree: Oh Yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Well,
Kate: And I can't remember if I said this to you or somebody else because all conversations are a blur, but it's similar to how Gwyneth Paltrow can claim like, well, I don't get Botox anymore. And it's like, right, you don't. But that might be the actual truth. But what you're also not saying is, but I also do dot.dot. Dot
Doree: Yes.
Kate: That maybe isn't a specific injectable, but we're still a lot going on that is not being portrayed as part of your public image.
Doree: A thousand percent. Yes. And I think that it is, it's a privilege to be able to opt out of this stuff. It's a privilege to be able to opt in, obviously, because it's a financial privilege to be able to opt in, but it's also pretty privilege to be able to opt out or just, I don't know, getting to the point where you just don't care. There's a line in, and I can't find it. There's a line in Elise Hu's book, who is our Guest today
Kate: This is such, what did you intend to be so on topic?
Doree: I did not, but I was just thinking about this as we were talking where she overhear her daughters having a conversation, and I'm trying to find it and I can't find it, but it was basically one of her daughters is like, well, mom doesn't have to worry about that because she's already pretty. And Elise is like, Oh, Okay. This is a lot to navigate. Wow. I don't know. I, I think about that because I think it's easy to just criticize people for doing stuff when the fact is we live in a superficial society where it's easier to be pretty, I don't know. I didn't mean for this to get so deep today, but maybe that's appropriate because of our guest.
Kate: I think it's totally appropriate. And I think also the other thing that I have been thinking a lot about lately is aging and how the opinions I had about lots of things when I was 40, 30, 20 change with every year that I get older and there is a feeling as I am, I'm in my heading toward my mid forties of sometimes it does really feel like my skin is sliding off my face. There is a loss of collagen that is fucking real. And as much as I'm like, God, I want to just not care and just let my body do what it will, there's also the ways in which we do not get to control how our body transforms.
Doree: Yeah. Totally.
Kate: And how emotional that is. And this is just talking about your fate that I know that can happen in so many different ways with illness. Yeah. Chronic illness, different diagnoses, just again, just simple aging, hair loss, all the shit. And it is really upsetting. So I have become more gentle, I think, in my criticism because aging in our current beauty culture itself is a fucking nightmare. Adding in the aging part of It. It's like a double whammy.
Doree: Totally.
Kate: Well, whew, I'm sweating.
Doree: Yeah, I know. I took us there. I'm sorry.
Kate: No, I think these are really good conversations to have. I don't feel like I've fully developed any real, not necessarily opinions, but it's such a, it's so personal, right? It's so icky to me in a way because I, it's, there's my opinion for the world, and then there's how I feel about myself. That's years of feelings that's hard to kind of navigate.
Doree: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Well, Kate, should we introduce our guest?
Kate: Yeah. Doree, why don't you share their bio?
Doree: I would love to. Elise Hu is a host at large based at NPA West in Culver City, California. And she's the author of Flawless Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K Beauty Capital. And she wrote this book based on her experience in Soul, where she was for nearly four years, where she was responsible for NPR'S coverage of both Korea's and Japan. And before joining npr, she was one of the founding reporters at the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit digital news startup devoted to politics and public policy. And her work at NPR has earned her a DuPont Columbia Award and a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media for her video series called Elise Tries. She is brilliant, and her book is amazing. Whatever you think you know about K Beauty and just beauty culture in general, she goes so much deeper. And it's like, it's really fun to,
Kate: Its Such a great book.
Doree: Book. It's such a great book. It's so good. All right. Here's Elise.
Kate: Elise, welcome to the pod. We're thrilled to have you. Thank you. We loved your book. I mean, we know we loved your book, but Doree had got to blurb your book, so
Doree: I did.
Elise: She sure did. Thank you, Doree.
Doree: You're so welcome. It was truly was my pleasure. I'm well. I'm always flattered when someone asks me to blurb their books, but sometimes I'm more excited than others. Let's be honest. And I was,
Elise: The Blurbing economy is weird. I'm sure you've talked about this with other authors who have been on the show.
Doree: Yes. It's very weird. We don't need to get into the blurbing weeds, but yes, she did blur your book.
Elise: Should we just start with a mic check Once again. And just since this has been derailed by me talking about blurbs.
Kate: No, no,
Doree: Absolutely Not,
Kate: I think it's actually, I think it's fascinating. What we do want, what we do want to start asking start, let me start, take that again. What we do want to start with is the question we ask everybody, which is, what is a self-care practice in your own life? And as you may know, it can literally be anything to us. We have no parameters. What is your self-care?
Elise: I drive my ass to KTown, which sometimes takes 48 minutes, and I'll go get K Barbecue and follow it up with a boba, usually with a friend. But sometimes I'll do it by myself. Because this is how I took care of me. And it's part of the reason I really wanted to live in Los Angeles after being a foreign correspondent in Seoul. It was because I could have access to being around a bunch of Korean culture and eat Korean food. And the K barbecue in LA is comparable, if not better than Seoul. When b t s gets off the plane, they go and eat K barbecue in K-Town in Los Angeles. And so it's excellent. So something that's kind of indulgent, especially because it does require so much driving for me, is that I will do this. And I sometimes do it multiple times a month.
Doree: What is your, just for my own purposes, since we do live in Los Angeles, I know. What is your
Kate: I know, I'm like, where are we going here?
Doree: What Is your Korean barbecue Spot of choice?
Elise: It's the same as bts. It's called Agashi Gok. It is a lunch place. It is not fancy, no private rooms or anything like that. And it's been around for a while. It closed down during Covid and I thought it might not come back, which actually was a real crisis for me. But it's called Ahi Gok. I think it's at Hobart near sixth, but you can check to make sure. I like that one. And then I also, the faves parks. Chosen Gaby. Sure. Those are all reliable and great for a group. Yeah.
Kate: Yeah, I like parks.
Elise: When I go and dine alone, which is something really, I think as a mom of three children, I really enjoy because there's no chaos. The ubiquity of chaos is around me at all times because I have three young children. But so sometimes I'll just, this is why, I mean for me to go down alone.
Doree: Totally. Do you, wait, hold on one second. I just have a bts question.
Kate: Okay. Then I have a dining alone question.
Doree: Do You think they get the restaurant closed down before they go?
Elise: Not in the early days when they were here, but now they have to. They
Doree: They Must. Right? There's no way.
Elise: Yeah. When they were here at SoFi doing their week of concerts at SoFi last summer, they got the new steakhouse in KTown called Deto. So now I'm just name dropping Korean barbecue places all over the place.
Doree: Love it.
Elise: It was called Deto and Deto closed down, or it even opened yet, but opened just for them. But can you imagine you're eating lunch and then
Doree: No, that's what I'm saying. I'm like, there's no way they could go to KTown in anywhere in particular. They can't write, they can't go anywhere but particularly KTown and just show up and have lunch. I mean, it would be a riot. So
Kate: The city would have to shut down, right? Yes. My kids would be in the car and we would be driving.
Elise: Yeah, exactly. So, sorry to digress once again, we love to digress. This going to be a series of digressions.
Doree: We love digressions.
Elise: My good friend in soul is a translator and he translates Korean books to English. And a few months ago we were texting and he was in Korea, and I didn't know why he was up, cause it would've been 2:00 AM Korea time. And he said, I'm waiting on this New York publisher to sign off on something. I've been waiting on it forever. And I said, O on what? And he said, it's heavily embargoed. And I said, don't, don't worry. I keep state secrets. I have state department secrets. I have D O D secrets. I was a longtime foreign correspondent. I know some stuff and I have never shared them. And he's like, it's bigger than that. And I go,
Kate: Okay,
Elise: Jb. I say, jb, Jesus Christ himself better be coming off a plane and then arriving to save us from our sins if like to make this secret worth keeping. And then last week it was announced that he had translated BTS'S first book and it's coming out in July. And so then he went back to the old texts and said, see, like I said, it was bigger than Jesus.
Doree: Wow.
Elise: Yeah. Bigger than Jesus. So it's coming. BTS is, wow,
Kate: Listen, sugar or Jesus.
Elise: I know one or the other.
Kate: One or the other. I wanted to just circle back to the act of eating out alone.
Elise: Oh yeah. Sorry.
Kate: That sounds bad. I want to circle back to going out for meals by Oneself because, so I feel like, and also maybe this is also American where we're, so we've got to be with other people all the time, but I always kind of grew up thinking like, oh, how sad that person's eating at a restaurant all by themselves. And now as an adult, I can think of no other luxurious act, but I feel like I was always conditioned to believe that dining out was this communal activity that we did once a month as a family. And it sounds like, and I love going to restaurants alone. I'm so glad you've brought it up on the show and I'm just curious, and Doree, same to you. Did you all kind of grow up thinking that was a sad thing to eat at a restaurant alone and now think it's the greatest thing ever? It's such a delight.
Doree: Totally.
Elise: I felt a lot of social anxiety about it. I remember the first time I tried it, it wasn't until I was in college and I think I was traveling alone or I just wanted to challenge myself to do something I hadn't done before. And it was dining alone because of the same sort of baggage I think, or these notions that we normalize around. Oh gosh. That person. Just the idea of walking up to the host and saying one
Doree: Table for one. Yes, yes.
Elise: That scared me.
Kate: Yeah,
Doree: Totally.
Elise: That scared me. But now I love it. I consider it an act of self-care and I often bring a book and it's my opportunity to just sit and read and eat a bunch of food and then go get my boba after. Ugh.
Kate: Just an hour alone with TikTok and a delicious meal. Sounds honestly like heaven.
Elise: Yeah. Try it for your self-care.
Doree: Well, Elise, I mean, we are really here to talk about your wonderful book, Flawless Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K Beauty Capital. I'm reading that from my very own copy right here. Oh, I'm sorry. My dog is barking.
Kate: He loved the book.
Doree: He loved the book. I'm just
Elise: Oh, that means a lot.
Doree: Yeah, so he's very picky. But
Elise: It's amazing. Your dog is literate too.
Doree: I know. I mean,
Elise: I feel like you're bearing the lead.
Doree: He's really special, ladies. That's true. So Kate, I both read your book, but I'm assuming that most of our listeners have not. So would you mind just starting by giving our listeners a brief background on how you came to live in Soul? And then I guess this is also sort of the prelude to how you came to write this book. But yeah, how did you start noticing that beauty culture was so sort of pervasive?
Elise: Yes. So all the listeners of Forever35 will know what beauty culture is. What I argue in Flawless is that I happen to get plopped into the most extreme beauty culture maybe in the world today. Just for those who don't know, I was NPRs sole bureau chief. I founded the bureau there in 2015 when I was like five months pregnant with my second daughter. And I had a 16 year old Beagle and two cats and my husband and a toddler who was two years old I think at the time. And so I hadn't been to Korea before, not even to change planes at the Chan airport, but decided I wanted to get out of Washington DC and it had been a lifelong dream to be an international correspondent, to just be supported by a large and well-funded news organization in getting you overseas, helping with all the bureaucracy and the visas and just the legal hurdles of opening up a bureau. And so in the winter of 2014, I started making trips to Seoul to go kind of look around. And the first visit, my first visit to Seoul, I stayed in Yong, which happens to be the makeup mecca where you could stand on a street corner and it'd be like trick or treat. But for skincare products, you would love it. There were so many samples at every store. These store clerks would just stand outside and just yell things at you in just yell ingredients at you to try and lure you in. And you'd be at an Aude house and then three stalls down, it'd be another Aude house. And then three stalls down another one, same thing for Face Shop or Inis Free or Misha, and all these brands that you're probably familiar with because they're now huge K beauty brands. And so it was instantly noticeable and quite prominent to me that the way that Korea sort of sold itself as a tourist destination was with its K beauty products. But I think what I didn't understand fully until I lived there longer, I ended up living there for nearly four years and ended up having two more daughters when I lived in Seoul. But what wasn't immediately clear to me was how technology played such a role. Korea invested early in a nationwide broadband infrastructure that the US still lacks. And so you can be down deep in the bowels of the subway and never lose your streaming film, never lose your streaming content at all. And there's a place with screens just everywhere, screens on the tops of cabs, screens wrapped around buildings. It has the largest LED screen in the world. And so what these screens do is they serve as a transmission device for images constantly. So I was just getting blasted with images of the ideal Korean woman, the ideal Korean man. And over time it started, especially there's a difference between the way I look as an Asian American woman and a lot of these women in advertisements look. And so over time that's that kind of disparity when I looked in the mirror became kind became triggering for me of all my old anxieties and bodily angst that I thought that I had largely put away and healed from when I was 20 years old. So it was a lot at once and that was a long way to get a burger, but hopefully sums up what I was doing in soul and how these ideas started percolating.
Kate: Wow. Oh, over that time, how did you start to notice, I mean you kind of mentioned the way that this started to impact you and bring you back to feelings that you maybe hadn't had in years. How did you notice the individual impact that this had on you outside of being a journalist, right? Because I feel like oftentimes when we're journalists, were so good at tuning into the analytical side of things. How did it impact you personally?
Elise: I started being harder on myself in the way that I looked, right? A lot of people, so I write in the book that having freckles in Korea is you might as well have puss eating boils on your face. Cause they're like, Ooh, freckles, we can do something about that.
Kate: Oh my gosh.
Elise: But subsequently, it's not just, we can do something about that, but if there is a way to fix this problem, why wouldn't you? So there was a lot of supply driving demand when it came to aesthetic improvements. Korea is now the world's third largest cosmetics and skincare exporter. But in the cosmetics category that includes lights and wands and all of this sort of high tech therapy that you can now buy and just do in your own home, that's all being really largely exported from Korea. If you look at the backs of your boxes, you'll probably see that. So the Solutionism then drove problematizing things. It was sort of like, if you have freckles and we have the tools to fix it, why wouldn't you fix that problem? And it made me feel sort sort of more compelled to spend money to do things like that. So especially laser hair removal, I had never spent invested any money in that previously, but when I was in Soul, it was like, oh, it's so cheap and they do it so well. They are the masters of lasers, time to go spend a bunch of time getting hair zapped off. And so that's one really prime example of how you end up just, you don't even notice our adherence to beauty culture is so familiar that it's hard to step away and notice it. But when it came at me in such sort of jarring ways, I had to notice, I couldn't help but notice it happened with my size all the time. I am a giant in Korea. I'm five nine, I wear a size eight. And in Korea that's considered plus size. And so I would walk down the streets and shopkeepers would yell things like large size, large size at me. So you were aware that you didn't fit in and that I felt sort of unwelcome in the country because I couldn't fit into clothes when I went shopping. There's a chapter that I get into and it should come with a trigger warning because the thinness in Korea is a thinness that is so extreme. I've seen it nowhere else or the thinness standard in Korea is so extreme that I've seen it nowhere else on the planet. And the chapter is called free size isn't free because the clothes come in one size and it's free size and it's equivalent to a US size too. And so don't, the clothes don't change to fit. You have to change to fit the clothes. And it made me feel sort of unwelcome constantly when I lived there.
Doree: Could you talk a little bit about just how South Korea became this global beauty superpower and in your view, what aspects of South Korean culture sort of helped turbocharge this phenomenon?
Elise: In the 1990s, South Korea decided it needed new engines for economic growth. So it was already pretty giant and manufacturing. So Hyundai cars and Kia cars, and it was already really big in shipping as well, but because South Korea was like, okay, we want to be even better and are, this is a little bit before there was a financial crisis at the late 1990s, which also plays a role. But so in the middle of the 1990s it was just sort of like, let's find new engines of growth. And there were two that they focused on besides the ones where they were already dominant. One was technology infrastructure. So I talked about it was sort of broadband everywhere. It was wifi networks eventually became wifi networks. It was just top IT talent and r and d in that space then was, there was also a government report in 1994 that indicated if South Korea was able to make a blockbuster on the scale of Jurassic Park, that the financial gains of that would equal the manufacturing of more than a million Korean made cars. So if they just made one big film, oh my gosh, it was so much money could come back at the country. And so that was when South Korea was like, we really need to turbocharge the exporting of image and culture. And so a lot more money was put into, and this is both on the private side and on the public side, but a lot of private industry making films producing k-drama, producing K-pop and K-pop came out of around this period. And the head of one of the major K-pop agencies, SM iHuman who I write about, he formulated this idea of cultural technology that Korea was going to export its culture as if it was a product. And he thought of the exporting of K-pop in a productized kind of way. There is this mythical manual of cultural technology that specifies how much makeup to be worn, what formations that dancers need to stand in, what second in a video they needed to be splashed with rain or splashed with water because that is what people seem to engage in most. So it was like an early human driven algorithm because now we know algorithms do the eye tracking and track our engagement to show us more things that we like. Isman was doing this in the 1990s with the exporting of the OG K-pop groups and OG K-pop videos. And so you can see even from the history that K-pop and Korean pop culture exports were highly visual, they're not just musical products, they're also visual products and they're as much visual products as they are art. And as a result, they act as this global running advertisement for images of beautiful Koreans and the ways that they adorn themselves, the way they do their hair, the way they do their makeup, the shape of the shapes of their faces, the shapes of their bodies. So it's all sort of wrapped up into the selling of the state.
Doree: So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back.
Kate: How have you seen what started in South Korea? Have you seen it kind of play played out or excuse me, play out here in the us? What is the influence, the impact of South Korea's beauty culture as you see it now here in the states in 2023?
Elise: I mean, you see it on TikTok as much as I do. It is the multi-step skincare routines. It is the aspirational Dewey look or the glowy look. That was cool back when we were still doing, that was cool in Korea back when we were still doing Matt powder or matte finishes. So
Kate: They're decades ahead of us in terms of these trends,
Elise: At least a decade ahead on trends now we're seeing with success perms, men getting more perms that comes completely out of Korea and K-pop culture. Wow. Some of the other visual transfers that are influenced by K-pop are kind of the really sort of pale face with the pop of color lip. The really bright lip red or pink shadow, the reddish looking shadow is also a K-pop trend that I think you're seeing more and more around the globe. And then legs, obviously Korea, co Korea, there's this whole section that I write about about how Korea flexes its soft power with women's legs and the weaponization of long legs of K-pop idols and that there's an ideal ratio for those legs. And just as women, we just continue to get fragmented and broken up and disembodied and broken up into these various parts to try and Perfect. And I interrogate that throughout the pages.
Doree: How have you, well, you guys touched on this a bit, but I guess I'm wondering how have you seen South Korean beauty culture kind of permeate the US and how does it manifest in the US differently than it does in South Korea?
Elise: I think one of the big differences in how it manifests in the US is that we have, there's just so much more diversity in the US among our shades and our sizes. And that means that you can kind of pick and choose what aspects of Asian beauty standards or Asian beauty culture that you can choose to participate in. Whereas it's far less of a choice to follow the standards in Korea because 97% of Korea is Koreans. And so you are generally the same size as everyone else. Your hair is generally the same color, your skin is generally the same sort of base shade. And so there is far less range and diversity to begin with. And so I think that you're working in a much smaller space and far more constrained space. That means that when you don't participate and you opt out of beauty culture in Korea, then the costs are greater. So you're suffering more for not participating, which is what I hear from the feminists that I spoke to. I was just, actually, it was really moving. I just over the weekend met with about 50 or so of the Korean feminists who took part in this movement called Escape the Corset.
Kate: Oh yeah.
Elise: And they took part in 2018 in essentially a general strike against aesthetic labor. They were like, we've had it. We've had it with all of the mandates on how we're supposed to look, but this extended of course into how they could occupy space and move about the world and how they were allowed to behave. And so they were just like, you know what? We're crushing our compacts. We're cutting our hair. We're not going to do this young ingenue look that is desired. We're not going to perform for the male gaze or a technological gaze or a machine driven perspective. And they paid a price. So a lot of them were uninvited to family gatherings. They are constantly getting bullied by their bosses. There was one teacher that was speaking to me over the weekend saying, I look like this. And then I have students asking me why I don't have my hair longer or why I look the way I do and why I don't spend some time getting ready in the morning because they see me as lazy and incompetent. Cause I don't work on my outsides and my exteriors. So that is the way beauty culture can be so insidious when it becomes a mandate for all of us to do the work to fit in. And then if we don't, there are social and professional costs.
Kate: The term aesthetic labor is so on the nose, and one I feel like I've never really utilized, but is something that is, I mean, that is exactly what it is, right? Yeah. It's just labor for aesthetic like it, and it's exhausting. I mean, just I'm saying this just individually and so hearing about their experience is, I mean that movement is inspiring, but it's also very fucking hard
Elise: And it's not unique to Korea, right? Yeah. This is one of the things that hopefully comes out by the end of the book is that we are more alike than we are unalike, that I hold up what is essentially a mirror soci mirror society that's just a little bit ahead of us in terms of being influenced by technology. And then it has other characteristics that make the beauty culture seem more extreme, the lack of inherent diversity because it's a nation of all Koreans, but also its technology systems are so much more developed that you are getting blasted with more images faster, better, stronger than maybe we are. And as a result, those algorithms are showing us what to look like more often if you're living in Korea. What was I going to say about aesthetic labor? Oh, yes. So once I started thinking about aesthetic labor, thinking about this work that we do, whether it's shaving, plucking, tweezing, dying skin treatments, all the various things that we have to sometimes research and then go to the appointments or go and buy the products and then apply the products or actually do the plucking, tweezing, waxing, whatever it is, once I started thinking of it that way, I also thought of it in the spectrum of long tail use of my time. If I start shaving or if my daughter starts shaving at eight instead of age 10, then there's two more years that she's going to be shaving for the rest of her life. And so much of this upkeep is sort of maintenance that once we start, we can't stop. I feel that way about Botox, which I don't get into sort of individual choices because I feel like I always hate the game and not the player. Our individual choices actually are a much smaller piece of the larger problem, which is culture. And so I want to keep our eyes on the systems, but I personally don't choose Botox because from what I understand, once you start it, you have to keep going back and I just don't want to go back. So I think a lot about labor in those terms. It's like, well, what do you want to do forever?
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, go ahead, Doree.
Doree: Well, no, I was just going to say one thing that you talk about a lot in the book is how so much of this is done to look like you're not doing anything
Elise: Affecting effortlessness out of effort,
Doree: Which is so pernicious. And just reminds me of some conversations we've had on our show around the no makeup, makeup look and all, you're supposed to do all of this but not look like you're doing any of it. That trying too hard is kind of frowned upon. And that just also seems like such a dangerous kind of paradigm to have to be a part of.
Elise: Imagine if you went to work and you did a ton of work and then you never got credit for it at all. In fact, they didn't even notice you had to hide that you did any work.
Doree: Well, it's really,
Elise: It happens a lot, right? And it breathes,
Doree: It's kind of reminiscent sometimes of the dynamic motherhood of childcare or people dont.
Elise: household labor,
Doree: Household labor. I will say there are things that my partner does not even realize that I do, but if I stop doing them, suddenly he notices it's, it just reminds me of those conversations. Yeah,
Elise: I feel that way. I feel like I've trying, been trying to stop doing things precisely because of that. I will not pick up random dirty dishes, like random bowls of yogurt that are left in a bedroom and then Ill, I will just not pick it up until somebody notices after it starts curdling or spoiling because it's like, no, man, I'm not doing invisible labor. Yeah, I ain't doing it. Yeah, totally. But yeah, so the makeup, no makeup, there's a term for it in Korean too. It's gu on you, and it's decorated, not decorated. And that is also the ideal. So as we get back to your earlier question about how these ideals are actually global, that's another one of 'em. It's to do a lot of work, but look like you didn't. And often this is a matter of class. You have to have the time and the freedom and the money to be able to even look decorated. Not decorated or makeup. No makeup. Yeah. And so many of the things that make you seem fresh without makeup are actually more expensive procedures. For example, I'll go and get eyelash extensions partly so I don't have to wear makeup. And so it does make it seem sort of like, oh, I just got out of bed this morning and I look awake and I didn't have to put on any eye makeup, and it's because I spent hundreds of dollars having an expert like painstakingly apply extensions to my lashes. That is a class thing that's like, that's a privilege that I can afford. And so I don't think that we can ignore those dynamics in so many of our beauty routines and then how we present ourselves to each other because it marginalizes people who can't afford it for one. But it keeps the rest of us sort of trying to keep up with the Joneses and anxious and exhausted.
Kate: Yeah, I find this, I mean, I have a similar experience with getting a lash lift recently where I spent a lot of money. So then we just have, is that
Elise: The perm for the lashes or is it dying them?
Kate: It's the perm. Okay. It's the lash perm. But it's also reminds me of similarly when you hear a celebrity say like, well, I don't get Botox. And then it's like, but how do you look this way? And it's because there's other stuff going on, so it may not be like, you can claim not to get Botox, but that's because you're investing in $5,000 thermos or whatever. Yes. So it's very, nobody can win, essentially, right? We're all just circling trying to keep up and failing.
Elise: And I ask myself a lot of these questions and started interrogating this because largely because I have daughters, and I think they were already being asked questions. My three year old in Korea was asked whether she had eyelash extensions. And so this logic of even really young girls having to do work was very galling to me and jaw dropping. And I thought, gosh, I don't want them to be in on the same hamster wheel and could we have a more aspirational way to live in which we could feel less bodily angst and shame all the time and feel good in our bodies and appreciate our bodies from the inside out.
Doree: Do you think, or I guess to what extent do you think all of this is about patriarchy and the male gaze?
Elise: A lot of it, I mean, so much of our media and our ideals are designed by men. And even today, so I write about something called the Technological Gaze, which has elements of the male gaze written into it, which is back during second wave feminism. The idea of the male gaze is how women are expected to perform for the eyes of men, the perspective of men. And now there's something more insidious and I think internalized and self-policing and narcissistic, which is what I call the technological gaze, which is a machine-driven perspective because now we see ourselves on screens more than we ever did when we were children and way more than our parents did. And you will look, if you look at the history of the growth of the beauty industry in the west and then subsequently the east, it really was born out of photography. So it was born out of us seeing ourselves. And so now we are seeing ourselves in a supercharged hyper or modern time and constantly being shown the ideals of what other people look like. But the ideals for how we could look better too on filters, the bold glamor filter, which came out in February and has already been used something like 55 million times on TikTok. It's an AI tool that helped develop this filter that makes you look like a cross between a Hadid sister and Jessica Rabbit and a Kardashian and plumps your lips, slims down your jaw. Y'all have seen it. I'm sure your listeners have too, arches, your eyebrows instantly does all the eye makeup. And these filters, we don't know exactly how they're made, but they are largely fed on data of what eyes, audience eyes view as desirable. So beauty standards of the moment get baked into our technology and our filters and the ways that we can try and upgrade ourselves. They're even built into Zoom, touch up my appearance in progress, early Zoom, where you can touch up your appearance, what standards are baked into those filters. It tends to be what smoothing your skin. It tends to slim down jaws from what I've noticed. And so I just think we have to be aware that our technology is constantly feeding us ideals too. And then we are feeding it back. It's this feedback loop because we are taking photos of ourselves, and then we're getting those lens apps to, so that we can see Warrior Princess versions of ourselves. The Lens app is the AI images that you got. You probably saw them around Christmas 2022 when a lot of your friends were putting kind of AI images of themselves where they looked like paintings on Instagram. So that's another example of something that's an element of the technological gaze. So the male gaze is part of it because men are the ones who program a lot of these algorithms, but they've gone way farther than that because at some point this advanced math is not even understandable by the people who originally came up with them. I was listening to an interview with the CEO of TikTok, and he's like, I can't actually explain to you why you are shown what you're shown. I mean, I have a general idea of how these algorithms favor A and B, C or D when you're shown various videos. But as technology advances and these algorithms get more and more personalized for you, that's beyond what the original programming was doing. And this is important because what we see so often is ourselves is other people, is what other people look like. And then if we are only shown a certain range of thinness, or if we're only shown a certain range of beauty or ideal beauty, then it's harder and harder for us to have preferences that are beyond that echo chamber. And it's hard to break out of it too. I mean, once I feel like we're so passive when it comes to what we're shown online, and it's hard to be like, oh, okay, I'm going to really diversify my feed because it does take active work to do. So that was also a long way to get a burger about the male gays question. Shorten it.
Doree: No, we like it.
Kate: Yeah, we do like it. I kind of just circling back to TikTok and what you were saying, and I, I'm so interested in how we experience beauty culture now through social media and even things like influencing and what seems a backlash movement is also still kind of part of beauty culture in a way. I guess I'd love to know what you are seeing because
Elise: Because de-influencing is still consuming, right? Yes. Because it's sort of like, this doesn't work, but this does.
Kate: Yeah. It's different than the movement, it sounds to me, anyway. The movement that you were talking about, the kind of rebelling against the, what's it against? The corset. Corset, yes.
Elise: Escape the corset
Kate: Felt like a real kind of, almost like a burn your bra.
Elise: Yes.
Kate: Kind of movement
Elise: Consciousness raising, right?
Kate: Yes. Yes. And I'm not sure if the same thing is even existing now on a larger scale if it's more individuals. Have you seen anything kind of this happening, especially specifically in the us?
Elise: I wish I would see something similar in the us but there have been there. I feel like there we are having a much more affirmative or affirming conversation about bodily shame, about diet culture. I think, yeah, I mean, at least diet culture is getting really challenged in many spheres. I'm actually reading Virginia Soul Smith's book that just came out Fat Talk and it's next. That's great. And I really feel like it's in conversation with what I've been writing about. Look, so I haven't even mentioned look localism at add another form of discrimination to the isms and the phobias out there. Localism is the term used to describe the appearance based discrimination you see all over South Korea, and it's rather prevalent. It happens in classrooms, it happens on the subway, it happens everywhere. It happens where when you are applying for a job and you have to attach a headshot to your resume, it happens when you're dating and you are rated on a series of specs. So the term specs is used to describe humans instead of devices. And those specs will include your bra size and your height and your weight and your skin quality, and whether you possess a certain cuteness called Eggo. And so appearance brace discrimination is another way that we can get bullied as well. And a lot of Korean women talk about how they started getting bullied in elementary school for, they were often called, I guess it's a common insult, but they were often called ape and gorilla just for being kind of hairy, I guess, or just having fuzzy arms because there's an expectation of hairlessness, which also is increasingly a global beauty standard. And that those kinds of insults can last a lifetime. They really, they become political because they can keep us from showing up and speaking up and sometimes even leaving the house. And so we need to take appearance based discrimination really seriously.
Doree: Well, Elise,
Elise: I'm throwing a lot at you.
Doree: No, this is great. And for anyone who is interested in these topics, please pick up Elisa's book. It's so great. So it's well written because it's personal, so informative, so deeply well reported, but also engaging. So I just loved it.
Elise: There's a birth story in there.
Doree: There's a birth story. I mean, had it, there's an eight week old baby having a facial. I mean, there's just like,
Elise: There's a lot. I Know we've, we've had this very heady sort of philosophy based, tech theory based interview, but really the book has a lot of just absurd funny.
Doree: It does. It does. Elise, where can our listeners find you and hear more of your work?
Elise: Everything is found at my website, elisehu.com, E L I S E H u.com. And since Twitter has taken a nose dive, I've been hanging out more on Instagram.
Doree: Okay.
Elise: @EliseWho.
Doree: Great. Well, thank you so much. This was really fun to get to talk to you.
Kate: Well, I loved chatting with Elise. That was a fricking
Doree: Me too
Kate: Blast. Her book's fantastic. There's so much to think about right as we started off this conversation of this episode, it's like the tip of the iceberg.
Doree: Totally. Totally. So definitely get her book if you're at all interested in these topics.
Kate: Doree, I have to confess.
Doree: Okay.
Kate: Well, first let me just say that I did accomplish my intention for the last week of taking, breaks from my Apple watch. And also it's fun not tracking my exercise. So like, For example, when I play pickleball, I always immediately turn on my little pickle ball thing in the fitness tracker and track my pickle ball. And I have been practicing the art of doing it, doing a physical and not tracking it on my watch, because I kind of think all these trackers are only adding to behaviors that I'm not Like they take me out of the enjoyment. They make the focus about something else. You get it?
Doree: I do.
Kate: So I did that one, and for my intention this week, I have to accomplish it in the next 24 hours, but it's to clean my office space. And I need to do this because you are coming into my office tomorrow.
Doree: I am. It's true. Yeah.
Kate: Right now, there's no place for you to sit. There is a big jar of roasted peanuts that you could eat out of, but there's really no room for you, so I got to kind of clean it up in here.
Doree: Okay. Well, truly don't feel like you have to get very intense about your cleaning. For my sake. Really?
Kate: I'll clean my retainer. Let me start with that. I'll clean my retainer for you.
Doree: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Kate, this past week I wanted to kind of take stock because it was my birthday and I feel like I'm still in the process of it. So I think that this is also my intention for this coming week.
Kate: Well, I feel like you're doing a great job taking stock.
Doree: Oh, thank you.
Kate: Because you took stock a lot on this episode, so
Doree: I did take a lot of stock. It's true.
Kate: Yeah. I loved taking stock with you today. Friendly reminder for everybody out there that this show is Forever35 is hosted and produced by Doree Shafrir and Kate Spencer. It's produced and edited by Sam Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager, and our network partner is Acast, and we will talk to you all later. Thanks for listening.
Doree: Bye.