Korean Beauty Standards Are Everything Wrong With Society

Añadido: 2026-05-27

[00:00:03]Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, because I know this is about to be a wild ride here, man. We uh are back on the Moon Channel. And yo, y'all know I've been reacting to a few of these videos covering this topic.

[00:00:18]Says Korean beauty standards are everything wrong with society. Now, this original video will be in the description for you guys to check out more and even subscribe. It's pretty crazy, man, because you know, always try to push the message of being happy with yourself, love yourself, you are enough.

[00:00:38]But again, people see stars, they see famous people, they see influential people, and you know, it's one of those cases though, if this dude jumped off a bridge, you going to jump? Yeah. They gonna follow them. They gonna follow them and do what they are doing, man. no matter what type of consequences come from it. But hey, we ain't going to waste no more time. Let's jump right into it. What does the average person do when they don't like their face? For most of human history, the answer was probably nothing. Today, the answer is something else. And nowhere has the answer been pushed harder or further than in one country that built a toxic culture surrounding looks and image decades before anyone else. South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic surgery in the world. And it isn't even close.

[00:01:26]Roughly one in three Korean women aged 19 to 29 have had work done. And then think of how many people you know who have had plastic.

[00:01:34]>> 19 to 29. Man, you know we all get older. We all go to age and you would think like the people who are, you know, maybe closer to their 50s, 60s, 70s, stuff like that. But 19 to 20 surgery. Then listen to this answer from a random girl on the street in Korea.

[00:01:59]How many of your friends have had plastic surgery?

[00:02:02]>> Highest.

[00:02:02]>> I would say almost everyone, she replied, "The result of this is a generation of women who, by their own country's admission, have started to look remarkably similar. When the Miss Korea 2013 lineup went viral, Koreans on Reddit joked the contestants resembled an army of Samsung robots. Korean men have had their own aspirations with a quintessentially sharp jawline, high nose bridge, pale skin, double eyelids, and big eyes. All unnatural, risky, and sometimes even costing years of wages.

[00:02:30]Before you write this off as a Korean problem, just look around our society today, and the chances are the same pressures exist all around you. Now, we're only a few years behind and the results are already starting to show on your doorstep. And now, I know that America and Europe have plenty of their own trash reality TV, but Korea takes it to a new level with Let Me In, made in collaboration with a plastic surgery hospital, where they take anyone they deem unacceptably ugly, then unambiguously call them monsters.

[00:02:59]>> You see that? You see what I'm saying?

[00:03:00]that they deem it's a form of bullying and and people end up listening to that and say I want to change but at the end of the day it's all it counts on what's inside cuz a lot of people do these surgeries and they still aren't happy and give them free cosmetic procedures.

[00:03:20]There's usually an interview where they pry into how bad someone's face makes them feel.

[00:03:46]Sometimes even the families appear to publicly apologize for somehow giving birth to poor souls they drag onto the show. But the thing they don't show us is plastic surgery in Korea doesn't always have the happy ending all the adverts imply. And this is far from a utopia of beautiful people at peace with themselves. The victims don't get much worse than a former Korean model called Hang Maku who appeared on national television having endured 20 years of various surgical procedures until every clinic in Korea and Japan refused to operate on her. One doctor handed her a syringe and silicone and told her to inject herself at home. When the silicone ran out, she switched to cooking oil from her kitchen. And this is what happened next. Children in her neighborhood called her. Doctor handed her a syringe and silicone and told her to inject herself at home. When the silicone ran out, she switched to cooking oil from her kitchen. And this is what happened next.

[00:04:42]Is that the before and after cooking? Yeah. See, as I say in the other video, it's mental. It's a mental illness, man. Children in her neighborhood called her the standing fan because her tiny body looked even smaller next to her swollen head.

[00:05:03]Doctors eventually had no option but to remove 260 g of foreign material from her face and neck. And this is just one of many cases of extreme cosmetic surgery addiction which is rapidly rising across Korea right now, especially among young people. And despite the country's image as one of the most technologically developed and modernized nations around, the safety record of its plastic surgery industry leaves a lot to be desired. Korean medical law lets any licensed doctors, meaning a dentist, dermatologist, even a GP, perform cosmetic surgery. And so this means higher risks for the patients. This 24year-old university student calledwand he had been bullied for his chin and didn't tell his family he was booking the surgery. It was to be the last decision he made.

[00:05:50]>> He died of a hemorrhage in Seoul in October 2016 after 49 days in a coma as a result of jawline surgery.

[00:05:59]>> Wow.

[00:06:00]>> His mother, E Nagam, obtained CCTV footage of her son's procedure. In 2013, a high school girl fell into a coma during a standard nose surgery. In 2020, Hong Kong Harris Bonnie Avita Law flew to Gangnam in Korea for a birthday lipo suction package. Staff of the clinic were later charged with forging her consent signatures, and she died before the ambulance reached the hospital. In January 2024, another Chinese tourist died after lipo suction performed by an orthopedic specialist. One woman had six surgeries in one single day and then died with her family receiving half of the expected compensation all due to the lobbying from the medical industry which is very highly protective of these clinics. These examples are practically endless. So much so that most don't even make the news. Many of them involve what's called a ghost surgery. Clinics double book and once the patient is under anesthetic, a substitute is weled in with little to no experience. And there were 100,000 victims of this between 2008 and 2014 alone.

[00:07:01]>> 100,000. See, this is the stuff that people may not know about.

[00:07:07]Or some people may know about it and be like, "It ain't going to happen to me."

[00:07:12]The money, man. The money.

[00:07:15]So now operating rooms require CCTV to prevent negligence as well as assault and unauthorized organ harvesting. I believe that CCTV in an operating room can prevent crimes such as ghost surgery, unauthorized organ harvest, sexual assault, and quite a few medical accidents in absurd situations. If you think this is simply a matter of cherry-picking stats and cases to make South Korea look dystopian, think again.

[00:07:43]It has 750 doctors criminally charged with professional negligence every year, which is 14 times more than Japan, 26 times more than Germany, or 500 times more than the UK. Korea convicted 670 doctors of manslaughter by occupational negligence over 6 years, compared to just a handful in the UK and France, which have only slightly larger populations. And the conviction rate itself is still relatively low. And the government's reaction to this wasn't to protect their citizens, but to lessen the punishments. The Korean Medical Association, a lobby group with over 140,000 members, said that tightening them would put aspiring surgeons off the profession. They fight against any regulations the government attempts to impose. But since many still have this spotless perception of South Korea as more medically advanced than Turkey, Eastern Europe, and other cosmetic surgery hotspots, surgical tourism continues to skyrocket, especially in the age of looks maxing. 7.5 million people have traveled to Korea from all over the globe to go under the knife.

[00:08:46]It's the lure of cheaper prices and the fact that Korean plastic surgeons are regarded as among the best in the world.

[00:08:52]>> And so it's $8,000. In South Korea, it's anywhere from 2,000 to 4 or 5,000. So, it's significantly cheaper and I think that the results will be better.

[00:09:00]>> You can even book airport concierge pickup services where the clinic collects you for your procedure and then drops you back straight afterwards.

[00:09:08]Despite flying so soon after the surgery, raising the risk of blood clots forming in your legs and traveling to your lungs. And for where this all comes from, it begins inside the dystopian South Korean economy. We've made a video before discussing how strict the Korean education system is. As the workforce's credentials are priced into a labor market where everyone has to study to a high level to be in with a chance of a respected job, hard skills have become commodified almost to the point of extinction with everyone arriving at the interview holding the same nearperfect CV. So the only edge left is how you look as you walk through the door. And this has created a form of discrimination that's at least functionally illegal across the developed world. Korea is very hugely competitive society and in their job market. Beautiful face is a kind of a great weapon because beautiful people always are chosen first.

[00:10:04]>> Korean job applications still routinely demand a photo and many ask for height, weight, even family background. A 2019 blind hiring law was meant to stamp this out, banning appearance-based questions at companies with 30 or more workers.

[00:10:18]Yet enforcement has been patchy and the practice persists.

[00:10:22]>> So you can't have just a good uh spec on your resume.

[00:10:27]>> You can't just have good grades.

[00:10:28]>> Yeah, you can't cuz everybody has good grades. Everybody has all these credentials. So how are you going to get ahead of it?

[00:10:35]>> One typical story follows a 28-year-old man who spent 3 years sending out CVs after finishing his communications degree. But he was getting nowhere. When he started calling recruiters back to ask why, it wasn't his qualifications that were turning out to be the problem.

[00:10:49]>> When I call back employers to find out why I wasn't hired, I'm told, "You're too skinny. Your face is too thin. Your eyes are too small. My appearance counts against me."

[00:11:01]>> You have to fill out a medical evaluation for some jobs, but this is often used to analyze your physical form and body proportions. A company once asked me for a medical certificate to say I was in good health. This document shows all the details of my body. The size of my chest, my thighs, all the specifics of my anatomy are there. I gave them this document at the interview, but I wasn't hired. In the end, he caved in and booked an eye enlargement procedure that's been rapidly increasing in popularity amongst Korean men. At what might be a pretty reasonable $2,000 if you can't get a job and taking around 30 minutes, it sold as a no-brainer. When I had more slanting eyes, people didn't think I was friendly. I've even been told that I wasn't getting a job because of my looks. Today, my eyes are bigger and I can look people more easily in the eyes.

[00:11:59]The infrastructure behind the industry is about as convenient as 7-Eleven. You walk into a clinic and ask for a package that's unambiguously called employment surgery. It includes double eyelid, nose, sometimes as slimming of the jaw, all timed around the job hunt with the swelling settled in time for interview season. Many girls are even given this as a graduation present by their parents. Out on the streets, the built environment constantly reminds you of the pressure to align your looks with the successful young population. across subway stations. Plastic surgery ads have accounted for some >> Yeah. In that other video I watched, you know, he went down the street with just all thesearmacies and stuff, man.

[00:12:37]It's It's crazy. It's like a crazy beauty standard to like for people to just not be happy with the way they were born.

[00:12:47]It's one thing to be like, "Oh, you know, I've put on some weight. I need to get in the gym and start working out.

[00:12:54]Maybe need to eat healthier." But that still won't change like your naturalb born features, you know?

[00:13:04]So, it's like I don't know, man. And and and again, it's going to when the kids grow up, they're going to have to get the same thing.

[00:13:17]>> Half of all adverts and cities even had to cap them at 20% per station to stop them from suffocating everything else.

[00:13:25]To walk down the street or take the subway in Seoul is to be bombarded by commercials for plastic surgery and even some real life examples.

[00:13:36]Turn on the TV, it's there, too. The ads had a particular kind of face that's been perpetuated by the country's entertainment industry. Korea has more economic and soft power than it ever has. And that's partly because they've anchored the culture to a near perfect image that's instantly recognizable around the globe. Most of their biggest stars don't enter the industry as themselves. Their faces, like their schedules and image, are managed by acting agencies and record labels, and cosmetic procedures are treated less as a choice than a condition of entry. In fact, it seems like a cannon event where a big Korean star publicly refuses or rejects plastic surgery. Some K-pop acts went as far as dropping the pretense around plastic surgery entirely, making it feel almost suspicious not to have had work done. The most insane example is the girl group called Sixbomb who made surgery the center of their promo campaign for their new album. Funded by the label which spent around 100 million1 or $100,000 on procedures for the members. The band released a becoming prettier before music video showing their pre-surgery faces. Then an after video with the postsurgery results. It all begs the question, how does the country even end up creating a system where you have to change your face and body to merely survive? The answer echoes something happening across virtually every modernized country on the planet. You work hard, grab your qualifications, and out grind the next person. You're then rewarded on merit, a life, a salary, a house, and a family.

[00:15:02]At least that's how it used to be.

[00:15:03]Modern society then tore that deal apart. And while it is very easy to point to career as ground zero, it's plain to see that the West is now facing its own epidemic of plastic surgery, looks maxing, and steroid and peptide abuse. But unlike the other body modifications that come with liberal society, like tattoos and piercings and dyed hair, people usually have plastic surgery to blend it.

[00:15:23]>> Like that guy don't even this guy didn't even look real down there.

[00:15:26]>> Smaxing and steroid and peptide abuse.

[00:15:29]>> Like this dude like he looks like like AI. Like they just slap some skin on a robot, you know?

[00:15:40]And then you have people be like, "Oh my god, he's beautiful."

[00:15:44]you know, but it's like, dude, like, you don't look real.

[00:15:51]And that's what they were talking about with all those actors. Like, you can't even show any type of expression anymore.

[00:15:58]But unlike the other body modifications that come with liberal society, like tattoos and piercings and dyed hair, people usually have plastic surgery to blend in rather than stick out. The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucious described a society where the group always mattered more than the individual and where standing out was the worst social mistake you could make. This is why Korea, Japan, and China are at the cutting edge of the plastic surgery boom because it's a tool for blending into a hierarchical society. But over the last 20 years, those ancient values collided with the western individualism these countries imported alongside everything else. And young people are now getting pressured from both directions at once.

[00:16:37]The traditional culture tells them to blend in. The new one tells them to stand out. You blend in to look like everyone else, and you stand out by being one of the prettier ones. In the West, however, you're pretty much just relentlessly told to stand out. But there's one big catch. Standing out is rarely the advantage it's sold as. So, it might feel more progressive, but really, these individual values can be hollow or promoted in bad faith. The people telling you to be yourself are usually the same ones selling you the products to help you do it. and the version of yourself they have in mind tends to look suspiciously like everyone else. Schools still spend years teaching kids that being different gets you bullied. Job interviews reward people who fit the company culture, meaning people who don't stand out from it. In places like Scandinavia, the law of Yante completely permeates the culture.

[00:17:24]Promotions are handed to the people who blend in and assimilate a role they probably don't give a damn about. Even among the celebrity class, they change themselves to blend in and keep up with others around them. Jim Carrey built his career on his facial expressions before the whole clone fiasco after his appearance at the Caesar Awards in Paris. The real explanation for what happened was much more mundane because there basically was no explanation. He's not made a statement and hasn't appeared in public since. But for all the evidence anyone has, he succumbed to the same pressure as everyone else. And the face that stuck out from the crowd like no other has been sanded down and won't ever look the same again. Ompic 2 has created a race to get to the lowest possible weight among celebrities who didn't even need it. It's not that there are no medically legitimate reasons for it, but the gratuitousness and commodification of making a potent drug a lifestyle product. The clearest answer to why cosmetic procedures of all kinds have become so infectious comes from someone who is probably not by accident Korean. Wang Chawhan was born in Su, lives in Berlin, writes mostly in German, and has spent years explaining how power once kept us in line by telling us what we couldn't do rather than what we could do. Think of prisons, factories, churches, fathers, and a boss that rules over the workplace with an iron fist. This has all changed, and Han argues that nobody's telling you what to do anymore. They're telling you that you can do anything and that you must, and the result is that you've become your own boss. This is the latestage modernity ideal that you work harder on yourself because you believe you're choosing to do it freely. Or as Han puts it, instead of forbidding people of their liberties, it works through the dreams of freedom and objects of desire.

[00:18:59]The body is the final frontier. Once everything outside has been converted into some form of transaction, the only thing left to optimize is the very thing you were born with. As Peter Tilliel once famously said, "Evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society." It might start with uploading your selfies to AI and asking it to score your face only to get back replies telling you in clinical terms that you're a low tier normie who now needs jaw surgery. You can even find DIY tutorials on the best AI prompts to get your own measurements. That's an easy access point because it's almost free, totally casual, and ubiquitous for anyone with a phone. The next level up from that costs real money. HIMS, the largest of a wave of US teller health platforms, offers testosterone replacement therapy via male subscription, allowing the company to hit 2.4 million subscribers in 2025, up 31% in a single year. Anything new can reliably turn into a subscription is obviously viewed as gold dust when it involves someone's deepest insecurities or desires. The idea should be that you're allowed testosterone products only when your testosterone is catastrophically low and therefore when you need it. But that's not often the case. While the idea that men have lower testosterone today than they might have a few decades ago is probably legit, reaching for the easy way out is rarely the right solution. Justin Dubbin, a urologist from Florida, posed as a mystery shopper and applied to seven of the major online TRT clinics. He reported a testosterone level above the normal range and said he wanted to start a family because tit shuts down sperm production. Six of the seven clinics then prescribed him testosterone anyway.

[00:20:35]Probably the most backwards aspect of this is that artificially created masculinity is actually robbing people of the prospect of having a family since TRT can kill sperm count which has already hit historical lows. Hubman eventually hits the nail on the head.

[00:20:49]It's basically a big cartel piggybacking off some very real social problems.

[00:20:53]>> I actually think it's worse than that. I think that they simply don't understand and don't care because it's a um pill mill and it's a money mill.

[00:21:02]>> Women are of course are dealing with the same issues too. One of the most popular cosmetic surgeries in the west for nearly a decade now has been the Brazilian buttlft which can easily cost $20,000 and is also by some distance the deadliest cosmetic procedure performed anywhere right now. having about one faith.

[00:21:18]>> And again, people know this.

[00:21:21]People still get it cuz they want to fit in and look a certain way.

[00:21:26]Like I I I don't know, man. It's just a wild wild world we're living in.

[00:21:33]Um I told you before, like I'm wondering if you didn't have all these apps where people could post stuff, would they do it? Cuz you know, a lot of people don't look in person like they look online.

[00:21:49]You know, you you see them in person, it may look a little different cuz you can't use no filter in real life. So, a lot of these people, I don't know if they would be getting surgeries if they couldn't post it anywhere. But when you do see them things walking around in the street, it's like, woo. Especially when the legs don't match. fatality per 3,000 surgeries.

[00:22:14]>> 150,000 Britons who travel to Turkey every year for cosmetic surgery. 28 have died at clinics across Turkey since 2019. And many hundreds more suffer complications.

[00:22:27]>> This year, more than 60,000 people nationwide will get a cosmetic surgery procedure called a Brazilian buttlft, made popular by celebrities and social media influencers. They're often called BBLs and actually have the highest death rate among any plastic surgery procedure.

[00:22:42]>> Does anyone actually need a BBL? Of course not. But somehow this insecurity propagated from one person to another and the opportunists moved in to prey on it. Social media has everything to do with all of this. Like how Instagram and Snapchat filters invariably give people high cheekbones, plumped lips, cat eyes, a small nose, and supernaturally smooth skin. Researchers at the University of Georgia built a simulated version of Instagram's recommendation algorithm, feeding it real selfies and letting it run. The popularity weighted algorithm designed to work like the real thing kept pushing users towards smaller and smaller variations in face until the most promoted influences in their data were measurably more similar to each other than a random sample of users would be. Social media isn't reflecting what people find beautiful so much as generating the answer internally and feeding it back.

[00:23:28]>> Like what the hell, man? Like look at that.

[00:23:30]>> Mr. promoted influences in their data were measurably more similar to each other than a random sample of users would be. Social media isn't reflecting what people find beautiful.

[00:23:39]>> Like look, man, you see what I'm saying?

[00:23:42]Don't this look look like uh like a mannequin?

[00:23:49]You know, you go to the mall. Well, hell, the mannequins don't even have faces anymore. But remember when the mannequins used to have faces?

[00:23:58]Like look at the the the the jaw the jawline there like like a wax figure so much as generating the answer internally and feeding it back in a feedback loop. So that's what freedom is today. people like Clav taking meth and using a hammer against his jaw and now getting mainstream recognition for doing so where you're told every day from every direction that you are unique and that you deserve to feel attractive and that just optimizing yourself is a form of self-care. And so the most aggressive form of hyperindividualism in modern history is now somehow producing a crowd of people who look exactly the same while at the same time feeling pretty alone and unwell about this. Korea predictably is the furthest along in all of this with the lowest birth rate ever recorded, the longest working hours in the developed world, and people eating alone in chain restaurants and going home to one-bedroom rentals designed specifically for single occupancy. But the worst thing about self-optimization as a way of living is that it has no end state. All while the country is completely collapsing populationwise with one of the worst fertility rates in the world. And one of the worst things about all of this is that there is really no end state. There will always be another edit or another layer that needs fixing until quite literally the human population collapses. And not just populations, but also the faces themselves. I mean, eventually the fillers and Botox run out, will cause permanent damage which needs sorting out in the surgery room. Ompic faces need rebuilding and the surgery that was cutting edge in someone's 20s now looks dated by their 40s while last year's protocol gets replaced by the next years. It's a deconstructive spiral just as much as it is a step up to a new level where nothing is out of bounds the market forces and the pressure they create for everyone. Now the very flesh and bone that make you human are up for grabs, ready to be edited in any way you want at the click of a button so long as you pay the price.

[00:25:58]No matter how no matter how many people cover this, talk about this, people are still going to do it. That's why I said it's something mental. Um I don't think people really understand uh how beneficial the gym and and a good diet can be, you know, cuz a lot of people get this stuff and a lot of them may just be dead inside.

[00:26:25]You know, you can't get no no surgery that'll fix your personality.

[00:26:32]You know what I mean? A lot of these people go from like, think about all the people who may get this type of surgery and then all of a sudden they go from being this quiet, chill person to just being a complete douchebag. You know, they talk about that like in law enforcement a lot that you have some people who may got, you know, got bullied in high school and then they become a cop and they just want to just go and arrest everybody for like payback cuz now they have this this power, you know? So my whole thing is that I feel like a lot of people aren't happy with themselves, but at the same time, I don't think surgery is the answer.

[00:27:28]You know, now of course you got people out there who pockets never go empty so they can pay for the surgery, pay for the upkeep or whatever, you know. And a lot of these people are getting getting their eyes done doing all this and you know, you see them in the malls and places wearing big old glasses. They ain't even showing the surgery, you know. But it's just it's just crazy to me how people do this as if that's going to fix everything, you know? And then you get some people who do it and try to act like they didn't get nothing done.

[00:28:08]Shout out to Moon for the video.

[00:28:09]Appreciate y'all coming over.

[00:28:12]That's a wild beauty standard, man.

[00:28:16]Peace out.