A few years ago, Oprah was the most-hated woman in South Korea (not for her poor medical advice as written about here), but for her story about South Korean women and cosmetic surgery. Outraged at the allegations, the "netizens" of Korea's Internet Community got busy and started waging a campaign against Oprah (or Ope as I like to call her). Some worried publicly that not only was Oprah angering Koreans, she was hurting the national image of Koreans.

The problem with this wasn't that the allegations were false, it was more likely that they were true. In South Korea, some forms of cosmetic surgery serve a kind of rite of passage. (and no, I'm not referring to hymen reconstruction surgery-that was more prevalent a decade ago). The surgeries, instead, seem to be aimed at westernizing the girl's features. This involves two basic kinds of surgeries: nose jobs, which actually elongate the noses and the double eye-lid surgery, which eliminates an extra crease in an Asian eye, making the eye bigger.

Double eye-lid surger, or Blepharoplasty, according to one site advertising a cosmetic surgeon's services involves "Crease revision and fat grafting for hollowness". Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Actually, the surgery seems not to be complicated, is very inexpensive and is probably (by my own rough estimation) done by over 60% of females of university age. When I first came to Korea, it cost roughly 300,000 won or $300 per eye, making it considerably cheaper than most of the cosmetic surgery options available to westerners. According to an upscale cosmetic surgery clinic in Seoul, this price has now doubled to $1,200 for both eyes.  The results, surprisingly, really work. A Kyopo (Korean-American) friend of mine was shocked to learn that my first impression of Koreans was that they had large eyes-he attributed this primarily to the surgery.

A rhinoplasty, which includes a "simple augmentation of the nasal dorsum with silicone implant" costs about the same. I've known a few rhinoplasty patients in the United States and they definitely did not get their noses "augmented".

The curious thing to me is that most Caucasians find Asian women, and often Korean women in particular, among the most beautiful in the world, with or without the extra surgery. In Korea, however, there are so many beautiful women that I think the bar is set a little higher than it is here in the United States. I definitely felt like a ginormous white girl amongst a sea of Korean beauties. 

Another objection to the Oprah program was that Lisa Ling, the Chinese-American reporter, did the coverage on the show. Many Koreans were upset that a Chinese-identified woman would have the audacity to disparage Koreans. Somehow, I doubt they would have been happier had an actual Korean gone on the show to tell tales.