Turn that frown upside down!

Apparently, many South Koreans are taking that to... the knife.  Smile surgeries, such as the Smile-Lipt, are one of the latest fads in Seoul surgery.  For a mere $2,000, you, too, can smile forever. 

I always wanted to look more Korean (I live in Alaska, most people think I'm Alaska Native), but it seems that Koreans want to look less Korean?  Eyelid surgery was always known to us; Mema had double eyelid surgery.  Make-up tattoos have been known of for a while; Mema said she wanted to "always wake up looking beautiful". These were things known, but never spoken of.  Double eyelid surgery is, allegedly, so commonplace now that they don't even refer to it as surgery anymore.  And it's not just for women!  South Korea has the HIGHEST number of plastic surgeries per capita.  There's even one of those tumblr pages dedicated to it.  Is K-pop to blame?

Personally, I have had plastic surgery.  Not necessarily by choice and not exactly some place anyone would see by accident (big baby, natural birth), but I have had it.  Cosmetic surgery for the sake of cosmetic surgery isn't my bag and I can't imagine myself ever shelling out those THOUSANDS of dollars for it, but I can SOMETIMES see the allure of purely cosmetic surgery.  Really, though, it's a little way scary how prevalent it's become.  Are we a world that will soon be unrecognizable to ourselves?  Is it just me or do scenes from the Hunger Games flash in your head???  I keep thinking about people having surgeries to look more like animals!  Cat eyes & noses, whatever.  Maybe this is a whole new world for some of the cosplay types.  Remember when people were getting their teeth shaved to be more like vampire fangs and playing Masquerade?

And now I have so many questions!  On average, do people gain or lose confidence after facial plastic surgery?  Has the rate of depression gone down in South Korea since plastic surgery has increased so much?  How does this correlate to the rate of alcoholism?  Does it correlate?  Do people's moms really stop harping on them so much about beauty after "fixing" all of their "facial deficiencies"?  Or do their moms complain anyway because that's just what they do?

I'm certainly not condoning, nor am I condemning, cosmetic surgery.  It's prevalence in the Korean community was just brought to my attention recently and it piqued some interest.  I just hope all those people getting all those surgeries, like everyone with tattoos (and I do have 2), don't later regret their youthful choices.  And if they do regret them, well, hopefully, they can live with them anyway.  But, hey, maybe they all turn out well :)

 

-Rikki