{"id":1415506,"date":"2026-01-21T15:19:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T12:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1415506"},"modified":"2026-01-21T15:19:04","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T12:19:04","slug":"are-western-beauty-standards-cooked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1415506","title":{"rendered":"Are Western Beauty Standards Cooked?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a new column for <\/em>Highsnobiety, writer <\/em>Sable Yong<\/em> explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

A few months ago, I found myself in the hot seat at Bryant Park\u2019s preeminent \u201cK-aesthetics\u201d medical spa, lured by the opportunity to try South Korea\u2019s hottest new neurotoxin. \u201cIt\u2019s all I use in my practice now,\u201d Dr. Darby Koh says, loading up my jaw muscles with 40 CCs of Letybo.<\/p>\n

As a longtime clencher, I\u2019ve only sought out this kind of silver bullet a handful of times. Along with tension relief, the added purported benefit of masseter muscle Botox (as it\u2019s more commonly known) is visual slimming of the face. I picture an Animorphs<\/em>-style transformation: a LEGO-headed girlboss shifting back into her natural delicate form.<\/p>\n

Non-invasive injectables are fast becoming a maintenance staple, along with biannual dental cleanings and highlight touch-ups. Not too long ago, a frozen face was ridiculed as vanity\u2019s folly. Now, it seems like every third forehead I see belonging to a woman in her early 30s is suspiciously smooth and shiny. That might have something to do with the med spa franchises popping up in every major city. And that<\/em> might be the result of appearance inflation wrought by our screen-integrated world. If you\u2019ve been on social media in the past year, you\u2019ve likely been scrolling endless chatter about which celebrities look mysteriously refreshed, more youthful, lifted<\/em>. See: the 70-year-old Kris Jenner looking closer in age to her oldest daughters, or Lindsay Lohan returning to the spotlight looking agelessly taut.<\/p>\n

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Getty Images \/ iMBC \/ Imazins, Getty Images \/ Mike Coppola \/ MG25<\/div>\n

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Perhaps most \u201chmm\u201d to me lately was Emma Stone\u2019s alleged upper blepharoplasty and\/or brow lift, which made our former hooded eyelid queen appear much more\u2026 alert, shall we say. In a viral Substack post, the anonymous writer described the situation as: \u201cthirty-six year old Hollywood crone Emma Stone recently got her face snatched so tight that she\u2019s now twinning with OG Iron Chef chairman Takeshi Kaga,\u201d followed by an image of Stone next to one of K-pop star Lalisa Manoban, captioned, \u201cthe first successful woman-to-woman asian transfusion. science is so beautiful.\u201d It\u2019s not the first piece of content I\u2019ve seen snarking on Stone for adopting an Eastern appearance. (It\u2019s not even Stone\u2019s first rodeo in similar race-related discourse; she was cast as a white-passing, half-Asian character in the 2015 movie Aloha.<\/em>)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Both my Letybo and Emma Stone\u2019s alleged \u201cbleph\u201d are the latest examples of how Western beauty has imported ingredients, procedures, and expertise from the East, particularly South Korea, in the recent decade. Like the ancient trade routes, hype trickles over to the West often years after the fact \u2014 or after FDA approval, in the case of my Letybo. As for the blephs that supposedly make people look Asian by way of lifting the eyes upward and outward, that cultural import is especially paradoxical, considering blepharoplasty\u2019s complicated history. During the Korean War, American GI plastic surgeon Dr. David Ralph Millard developed and performed what\u2019s more casually known as double-eyelid surgery on Korean war brides, sex workers, and translators to create a more \u201coccidental,\u201d or scrutable, appearance. (\u201cSlanted\u201d eyes were considered a sign of illegible stoicism or deviance.) Now, a surgery developed and perfected on Asian faces is (allegedly) being used to brighten and zhuzh<\/em> famous Caucasian faces. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the bleph has ranked among the top five most sought-after aesthetic procedures for the past three years.<\/p>\n

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Getty Images \/ Bert Hardy \/ Picture Post \/ Hulton Archive<\/div>\n

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From a global point of view, it makes sense that beauty is one of South Korea\u2019s main exports. The country is so collectively dedicated to being hot that its government heavily subsidizes the K-beauty industry as an economic driver of soft power. This has worked so well that I see sheet masks in the check-out aisle of every CVS and Sephora. Ten-step skincare routines have dominated YouTube and our medicine cabinets since the mid-2010s, and Korean beauty brands are heaped alongside American and European brands on shelves. Their affordability and efficacy have largely shifted an industry that once relied on price exclusivity and scarcity. Put plainly, Asian beauty products are way cheaper than US-made or European-made products, and that shit works<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Getty Images \/ Chau Doan \/ LightRocket<\/div>\n

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Does that make it accurate to say that South Korean or Eastern beauty ideals are becoming predominant? Not exactly, although these trends all have their moments on the clock app. I doubt we\u2019re all going to adopt pale skin, tiny heart-shaped faces, and a youthful, doll-like appearance as the new Western, or at least American, standard. But I\u2019m seeing so many beauty content creators post about \u201cdrinking your collagen,\u201d glass-skin teas made with herbs and fruits from TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) recipes, qi-gong practices to help drain the lymphatic system, and black sesame paste recipes for hormonal balance and to reverse hair graying. A lot of these content creators are of Asian descent,\u00a0but the avatars commenting \u201cJUJUBE\u201d to find out where to buy tremella\u00a0fungus so they can achieve mochi skin\u00a0largely are not.\u00a0If you\u2019ve ever been made fun of for bringing gimbap or dimsum leftovers to school for lunch, I\u2019m sure you, too, will find this incredibly ironic.\u00a0The TikTok ban psych-out that drew Americans to Xiaohongshu (a.k.a. Red Note, China\u2019s major social media equivalent) introduced a kind of neo-orientalism that cast an aspirational eye on Asia\u2019s advancements in fashion, technology, and, of course, beauty and wellness. Proliferated through the algorithm\u2019s inescapable current, it was only a matter of time for this too become commodified for our consumption.<\/p>\n

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Beauty standards have historically operated as a means of racial and class exclusivity \u2014\u00a0specifically upholding white, Eurocentric features. In our hyper-connected world, the introduction of a neoliberal multiculturalism allows us to dabble in new pinnacles of ethnic features: high cheekbones, full lips, a curvaceous hip-to-waist ratio, and, of course, youthful, plump, clear skin. Being considered pretty is one of the few privileges you don\u2019t have to be born into. Instead, you can spend time and money (and money and money) until you get there. So, beauty becomes an asset that allows us social and economic mobility in ways that have powerful impacts on what becomes aspirational, let alone ideal, in our culture.<\/p>\n

The ongoing hallyu<\/em> \u2014 that is, South Korea\u2019s increasing impact on pop culture \u2014 has further established Korean-ness, and more broadly, a vague Eastern-ness, as a bankable cultural import. I never would\u2019ve thought it would be cool or ideal to be Asian in America when I was growing up. When Chinese character graphics, satin qipao<\/em>-styled tops, and chopsticks as hair accessories came into style when I was in high school in the early aughts, that might\u2019ve been the moment. But in practice, my participation invited caricatured commentary, even while shiny takeout box-style purses in Delia\u2019s catalogs reigned supreme. Chinoiserie giveth, and Chinoiserie taketh away.<\/p>\n

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Getty Images \/ Chau Doan \/ LightRocket<\/div>\n

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But I don\u2019t think most of the Western world adopts other cultural practices or aesthetics with any kind of awareness. Usually, that adoption looks like decontextualized imitation \u2014 or sheer novelty. When I see beauty trends like the #foxeyechallenge pop off on social media, with no acknowledgement of the cultural significance of pulling one\u2019s eyelids upward and outward, or when Skims releases its Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap, a sort of compression wrap for the jaw, while Japanese and Korean convenience stores have been slinging all kinds of jaw-slimming contraptions for years, a strange dissonance occurs. Jade rollers, ear seeding, gua sha sculpting, and even color analysis have made their way into beauty and wellness routine absorption and cultural literacy only at a superficial level. One suspects that most TikTokers scraping a gua sha stone across their faces are not educated practitioners of TCM.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not that it\u2019s now aspirational to be or look Asian. It\u2019s more that Asian culture is so dedicated to beauty labor that the blueprint is easy to follow. (The \u201cmorning shed\u201d TikToks always make me think of this.) And while South Korea\u2019s great beauty movement was originally in pursuit of national pride, it has become synonymous with individual empowerment \u2014\u00a0something we know all about in the West. Global transference goes both ways in that regard.<\/p>\n

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Getty Images<\/div>\n

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American beauty, similar to American power, may be experiencing a bit of comparison anxiety when it comes to global supremacy. We can only keep up as fast as our infrastructure can accommodate. It\u2019s not that everyone will soon have access to the Kris Jenner facelift package, but that \u2014 with enough influence and innovation from nimble Eastern beauty markets \u2014 a lifetime of dedication can stave off the eventual \u201cneed\u201d for one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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My takeaway from the great beauty boom that followed the introduction of mobile social media is that our ideals are elastic and often polarized: bushy brows vs. thin brows, big butts vs. small ones, Instagram Face vs. baby Botox. We\u2019re currently indexing an era of subtle, \u201cnatural-looking\u201d tweaks that aim to obscure the passage of time. The East vs. West paradigm is a distraction from the ways they reinforce the impossible for one another. The one thing modern global beauty ideals agree on is that you can look like a lot of things, but not your age. Aesthetic variety and individualism offer us a generous spectrum of acceptable ways to appear, but one thing remains true: Aging gracefully looks a lot like not aging at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Four weeks after my Letybo injections, I returned to Dr. Koh\u2019s practice for a check-in. \u201cOh wow!\u201d she says, gently cupping my jaw in her hands and feeling the plushy give of my neutralized masseter muscles. \u201cYou have much more of a V-line now. Very Korean. Did we do your forehead too?\u201d I say something about how I prefer for people to know when I\u2019m mad at them. She replies: \u201cWell, it\u2019s up to you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/highsnobiety.com\/p\/are-western-beauty-standards-cooked\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to stay in the loop?We’ve got you coveredDownload the Highsnobiety\u00a0App now In a new column for Highsnobiety, writer Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives. A few months ago, I found myself in the hot seat at Bryant Park\u2019s preeminent \u201cK-aesthetics\u201d medical spa, lured by the opportunity to try South […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1415515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[56],"class_list":["post-1415506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-highsnobiety-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1415506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1415515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1415506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1415506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1415506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}