Faces, Fortunes and Feminist Movements

As far back as the seventh century, there has been a notion in Korea that one’s face is one’s fortune. Reading a face, like reading a palm, tells a person’s life story, their physiognomic features illuminating their past and their present, and also predicting what’s in store for their future. By evaluating one’s appearance, the practice of gwansang says, it is possible to evaluate other attributes, like one’s personality, intelligence, earning potential, health and so forth.

In South Korea, friends’ and lovers’ faces have been read to gauge their compatibility. Job candidates’ faces have been read to assess their qualifications. If a face is determined to be out of proportion or lacking symmetry, the owner of that face cannot expect much for their future. As one face reader told the Korea Herald: “The harmony of the features on one’s face is the most important for a good fortune. Someone could have a very lucky nose, but if it is out of balance with the other features on their face, they can’t properly receive all the blessings.”

For women, who have always been up against a male-dominated society that impedes equal opportunity and access, not being in position to “properly receive all the blessings” could be catastrophic. It could mean the difference between a life of comfort and a life of hardship. One misplaced eyebrow might destroy her destiny; one misproportioned ear ruin her fate.

“Since you listen to others with your ears, you can tell through looking at the ears whether or not a person is spiteful or good-natured and if they are respectful [of] others’ opinions,” another face reader said. “You can also tell whether they are strongly opinionated … even whether or not they have a good sex life.”

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Jeon Bora studies faces in a different way. From behind a camera lens, she watches as the faces tremble or wince or tear up, or fight to stay stoic, or—just maybe—spread their mouths slowly into something resembling a smile. The women’s faces she captures are completely bare, unadorned by makeup, fake eyelashes or facial tapes. For many of the women posing, it is their first time being photographed in such a vulnerable state. The resulting black-and-white images stay unedited Bora doesn’t use Photoshop—a standard in South Korea—or retouching tools of any kind. It’s not uncommon that, when the women see themselves un-Photoshopped for the first time, they break down and cry.

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Though plastic surgery is reported to have been practiced in South Korea prior to the Korean War, it was in the war’s aftermath that surgery, including the country’s most renowned procedure, was popularized. From the Japanese occupation, which had ended just five years before, the Korean people had already been subjected to ideologies of ethnic superiority and ethnonational identity. And so, when the Americans arrived with their money and influence—including the prominent surgeon David Ralph Millard—their perceptions of what was best and how to achieve it were received by fertile soil.

Millard was stationed in South Korea in 1954. His role was to perform reconstructive surgeries on children with congenital diseases and on soldiers. But in reconstructing war-wounded faces, he began to wonder, according to his racist written accounts of the time, how he might remake them in the Western image, taking them from “Oriental to Occidental.” It wasn’t until a Korean interpreter approached him, asking “to be made into a round-eye” so that Americans might trust him, that Millard had his first willing patient for a double-eyelid procedure. After the interpreter deemed the operation a success, many other patients followed, including sex workers wishing to be more attractive to Western troops. There were so many patients that Millard called South Korea, even then, “a plastic surgeon’s paradise.”

Today, more than 65 years later, double-eyelid surgery remains one of the most sought-after procedures in South Korea, and all kinds of plastic surgery are accepted as routine. A complicated coming together of the country’s own pre-existing beauty standards that revered the so-called royal, and rarer, features of high nose bridges and big eyes; the postcolonial structures of consumerism and commoditization; and a Korean cultural emphasis on conformity have culminated in the booming market that’s seen today.

Luckily for the cosmetic surgery industry, gwansang philosophy could easily accommodate and integrate its procedures.

The pressure to “take care of oneself,” though, disproportionately affects women, who are at greater risk of being objectified and sexualized, are more aggressively targeted by mass-media messaging and are then more likely to be blamed for not adhering to it. In South Korea, such messaging is created by the country’s multibillion-dollar beauty industrial complex—not only the plastic surgery, but also the skincare and cosmetics, pop music, film and other entertainment markets—telling women, over and over, that their most important asset is their looks, and if they can’t get a job or find a husband, it’s simply because they’re not pretty enough.

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The women who sit for Bora in her studio south of Seoul have come because they are done. They’ve decided they’re through with getting up three hours before work to put 18 products on their faces, just to prepare for another 18 steps of makeup application. They’re through with spending money they don’t have on the endless pursuit of perfection, and time they can’t spare worrying about failure.

So they said no to the machine. They threw away their makeup, cut their hair short and rejected plastic surgery. Posing for Bora was a way to document their liberation, and participating in Bora’s exhibitions was a way to share it. Some of the exhibitions’ other attendees were so moved that, after arriving with a full face of makeup, they took it off on the spot and left with none.

This is a movement known as Escape the Corset, or Corset Free. And for its members, it’s the debut of their own true selves.

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Traditionally, in South Korea, women are commonly referred to in relation to men. As one Escape the Corset member explained, instead of calling her by her given name, men refer to her as her boyfriend’s girlfriend or her father’s daughter. She said she is sick of being somebody else’s something.

In treating women like belongings, it becomes easier to objectify them. Today’s patriarchal standards for the perfect Korean woman are so narrow, inflexible and unrealistic that it’s almost impossible for any real human to live up to them. This woman must be sexy, yet pure and innocent, almost childlike. She must have luminous pearl-white skin, a small “V-line” jaw, a high nose bridge and big eyes with youthful fat deposits below and youthful straight brows above. Such standards fail to integrate any unique traits or celebrate any diversity, ethnic or otherwise.

It is no coincidence, though, that this exact face is also the country’s best-known public face, the impossibly beautiful PR brand it exports en masse to the rest of the world. And that’s because, for South Korea, this image is immensely profitable. The nation’s army of “K” hyphenates—K-beauty, K-pop, K-drama—all work in tandem to mutually reinforce this image and then make money off of it again and again.

The image sells cosmetics and skin-care and albums and concert tickets and ads. It brings in travelers who are eager to spend money on K-beauty tours and plastic surgery procedures and whitening injections and K-pop makeovers. It is, simply put, very, very good for the country’s economy.

But what of the effects on the country’s women?

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As the documentarian of Escape the Corset, Bora—like her followers—sets her own look according to her own standards, which, for her, means short hair, no makeup and androgynous clothing. In not resembling the mechanism’s defined image of the ideal woman, Bora says she’s attracted a lot of negative attention—almost always from men, who offer their unsolicited opinions, almost always misogynistic. “I thought you were a guy,” one old man driving a taxi told her. “Guys aren’t going to like you,” said another man. “You won’t be able to get married,” said another.

Comments like these don’t phase Bora, which is a big problem for the machine. If it can’t get her to feel bad about how she looks and manufacture insecurities that it can then sell her the fixes for, then it has failed. It’s not going to succeed in getting her money.

None of this is to say she isn’t upset. When Bora considers how her country has profited off of its patriarchy and monetized misogyny, it’s disconcerting. In doing the hard work of starting a feminist movement, standing against sexist standards and subverting the beauty industrial complex, Escape the Corset members admit they sometimes feel discouraged by how little awareness they’ve generated among the public—including the travelers who come with Gangnam on their minds.

Bora says that South Korea’s tourism industry is cashing in on the beauty industrial complex by using unrealistic images of women as lures is a real concern for women’s rights activists like her. Korean feminists, of course, don’t blame international travelers. But they can’t help but wonder: Do these tourists realize that Korean women live in one of the most gender-unequal societies in the industrialized world, ranking 108 of 153? Do these tourists worry about perpetuating a patriarchal perception of Korean women around the world that only further bolsters the mechanism here?

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South Korean culture says there are two versions of “face.” One is the biological face, a person’s actual physical face. The other is honor, or “saving face,” the opposite of shame, or “losing face.”

In 2017, the Seoul Metro banned ads for plastic surgery clinics in its subway stations due to widespread complaints from commuters, who said the images represented a rejection of gender equality. But, while it has announced several years ago, the ban has yet to take effect. That’s because clinics have already prepaid for ad runs, so complainants must wait until 2022.

Also in 2017, the South Korean government tried to prohibit employers from requiring job candidates to submit headshots with their applications, due to the pervasive discrimination it enabled. (Almost 40 percent of respondents in one survey reported such discrimination.) But many employers have gone on asking for photos, and applicants comply, because there is almost no penalty.

Bora, who runs a photography business, says there is one type of photo she absolutely will not take: the CV or ID photo. That is because, in capturing pictures, she prefers to read faces that are their own, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel, not putting on a mask that can only flatten who they are.

If the face truly is the “cave of the spirit,” as one face reader called it, then the flash of Bora’s camera might be the candle lit inside.