Digital culture is literally reshaping women’s faces

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In December 2021, American megawatt artist Ariana Grande posted a photo of herself wearing dark eyeliner, a foundation lighter than her skin tone, and a bright red lip often associated with Korean makeup. Online commenters dragged her so quickly for “Asian fishing,” appropriating her Asian features, that she quickly deleted her post. But some Asian-identifying advocates chimed in to say associating Grande’s appearance with “Asian” in the first place only confirmed prejudices about how Asians look: pale skin; smaller, slanted eyes. Earlier the same year, Oli London, a white British K-pop fanboy, underwent several cosmetic surgeries to look like BTS member Jimin. London later described himself as “transracial” and found himself at the center of controversy as a result. Power imbalances of cultural appropriation aside, these examples illustrate on one level that the West as a leading global aesthetic norm-setter is fading, much like the US role as a geopolitical standard-bearer.

Always at the forefront, Korean doctors have already reckoned with globalism. So Yeon Leem, a Korean biologist turned social scientist, says that clinics are constantly designing and fine-tuning their computer algorithms to analyze aesthetically attractive faces so they can recommend optimal procedures to their clients. These algorithms measure the proportions of beautiful people of all different ethnicities and analyze the aggregated data to discover “global proportions… what is the common beauty ideal across all races.” This is part of the technological look at work, feeding and creating demand at the same time. The machines learn which faces and features conform to the “magical” proportions glazed by science and present us with the latest aesthetic standards to achieve. Inevitably, they require expensive interventions or more cosmetic work.

Sociologists had already noted a regional trend, in the 2010s, of flattening many desirable traits into a single “pan-Asian face”: a mix of European and Asian traits with the focus and favor on what sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang calls ” a specific East Asian ideal: round face, thinness, and an even, untanned skin tone.” In his fieldwork, Hoang has studied the beauty practices of Vietnamese sex workers. He found that they engage in surgery and the alteration to achieve a combination of appearances, but that favors Asianness: “Now the new modern is Asian”, said his informants.

The modern Asian face is increasingly defined by a Korean beauty standard, and Southeast Asian women especially look to Korea for the latest and most advanced beauty products and procedures. Michael Hurt, a Korea-based sociologist who calls Korea “hypermodern,” photographs Seoul Fashion Week every year and has chronicled Korean looks with his street photography for over a decade. When she visited Vietnam to photograph models in 2019, she thought that one in particular looked like a Korean woman. “I noticed when she turned her head towards me, I was like, ‘Wow, you really look Korean.’ And she said, ‘My God, thank you. That’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever received.’”

This transfer of appearance ideals is neither linear nor unidirectional. It’s more of a mix and match towards what academics call neoliberal multiculturalism. Coined by Jodi Melamed, the term is used to refer to a global racial formation ideology that devalues ​​a country’s native culture, favoring the blending of multiple cultures. It arose after the civil rights movement in the United States and together with the globalization of capital. It is a branch of neoliberalism that incorporates multiculturalism, giving an extra shine to capitalism’s ethic of prioritizing profits and consuming and being consumed. Korean cultural researchers like Emily Raymundo see this happening in the global fusion of “beautiful” ideals: big lips from the Global South, bigger buttocks from Africa and Latin America, prominent noses from Northern Europe. “The consolidation of ‘the face’ is about a cosmopolitan mix of beauty standards (K-beauty, Bollywood, Hollywood, global Instagram influencers, etc.),” she wrote to me in an email.

It may not be long before these differences across the Pacific flatten out further into a transracial guise altogether. Korean beauty standards are being remixed into broader beauty norms today as the reigning beauty look becomes more of an Internet-driven global uniformity. In home design, for example, internet rental platforms like Airbnb have led to a sterile and recognizably similar aesthetic throughout living spaces. When it comes to aesthetic ideals for people, the global contest on Instagram plays out in a similar way, leading us to a largely homogeneous set of beauty standards that become more integrated the more they circulate in the marketplace of ideal faces and our desires.

And these possibilities for bodily change and enhancement are refracted through social media, where injections and surgery are sold among the many enhancements available to us in the name of “progress.” As cultural critic Haley Nahman observes, a mainstay of modern life is the belief that more technology is always better than less. She leads to some seemingly benign examples of “progress” actually making matters worse as the companies behind them make more money. She cites TurboTax, Face ID and self-pay and writes: “It’s easy to name examples of pseudo-progress and harder to imagine that our trajectory isn’t heading toward an increasingly ‘optimized,’ frictionless, fluid-brained world. One where the conditions this search has created thus far – alienation, hypernormalization, massive inequality – only grow more severe.” Botox fits into this framework as something we’re sold that relieves our individual stress about forehead wrinkles, aka aging, but it’s not good for the collective. It is an investment in a worldview that ought be wrinkle-free in middle age or even older. And feeds the anxieties of those who are not.