Ariana Grande, a famous American artist, posted a photo of herself wearing dark winged eyeliner, a foundation lighter than her skin tone, and a bright red lip often associated with Korean makeup in December 2021. However, online commenters accused her of “Asian-fishing,” appropriating Asian features, and she quickly deleted the post. Some defenders who identified as Asian weighed in to say that associating Grande’s look as “Asian” confirmed biases about what Asians looked like: pale skin; smaller, slanted eyes.
Oli London, a white British K-pop fanboy, underwent several cosmetic surgeries to look like the BTS member Jimin. London then described themselves as “transracial” and found themselves at the center of controversy as a result. These examples illustrate on one level that the West as a leader in setting global aesthetic norms is fading, much like America’s role as a geopolitical standard-bearer.
Korean doctors have already been taking globalism into account. So Yeon Leem, a Korean biologist turned social scientist, says clinics are designing and constantly tweaking their computer algorithms for analyzing aesthetically appealing faces so they can recommend optimal procedures to their clients. These algorithms measure the proportions of pretty people of all different ethnicities and analyze the aggregate data to discover “global proportions … what the common beauty ideal is in all races.”
Sociologists had already noted a regional trend, in the 2010s, of the flattening of many desirable traits into a single “Pan-Asian face”: a blend of European and Asian features with the focus and favor lying in what sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang calls “a specific East Asian ideal—round face, thinness and even, untanned skin tone.” In her fieldwork, Hoang has studied the beauty practices of Vietnamese sex workers. She found that they engage in surgery and alteration to achieve a blend of looks, but one that favors Asianness: “Now the new modern is Asian,” her informants said.
The modern Asian face is increasingly defined by a Korean beauty standard, with Southeast Asian women especially looking toward Korea for the latest and most advanced beauty products and procedures. This transfer of appearance ideals is not linear or one-directional. It’s more a mixing and mashing toward what academics call neoliberal multiculturalism. Coined by Jodi Melamed, the term is used to mean an ideology of global racial formation that devalues a country’s native culture, favoring the blending of multiple cultures.
Korean cultural researchers like Emily Raymundo see it happening in the melding of globally “beautiful” ideals—large lips from the Global South, bigger butts from Africa and Latin America, prominent noses from Northern Europe. “The consolidation of ‘the face’ is about a cosmopolitan mélange of beauty standards (K-beauty, Bollywood, Hollywood, Instagram influencers globally, etc.),” she wrote.
It may not be long before these cross-Pacific differences are further flattened into a transracial look entirely. Korean beauty standards are today remixed into broader beauty norms as the reigning look in beauty becomes more of an internet-driven global uniformity. In home design, for instance, internet platforms for rentals like Airbnb have led to a sterile, recognizably similar aesthetic across living spaces. When it comes to aesthetic ideals for people, the global pageant on Instagram plays out similarly, landing us on a largely homogeneous set of beauty standards that get further embedded the more they circulate on the marketplace of ideal faces and our desires.
These possibilities of bodily improvement and change are refracted through the social internet, where injections and surgery are sold among the many upgrades available to us in the name of “progress.” As cultural critic Haley Nahman observes, a tentpole of modern life is the belief that more technology is always better than less. It leads to some benign-seeming examples of “progress” that actually make things worse while the companies behind them make more money.
