It’s intensive, expensive, kind of impossible to keep up, but the results, they say, are promising.
The world has been evangelized that the Korean skincare routine must be at least 10 steps where we need to put on serum after serum that would take more or less an hour to complete. This craze is reflected through several Korean stars whom we all know have dewy almost-too-perfect glass skin. Also, did anyone else notice that these stars have the most perfect face and bodies that are really, nearly too thin?
The K-beauty trend from South Korea has been around for almost 5 years now and we have to admit, we’ve dished out thousands of pesos just to achieve translucent, poreless skin after investing in expensive serums, multiple exfoliators, and face masks of all sorts. In this year of age, we all—Koreans included—learned that the 10-step skincare routine is just impossible. The Koreans themselves even created Skip-care and all the lazy girls rejoiced.
But beyond Skip-care, Koreans are now protesting against this societal expectation for women. First of all, not all Koreans are of the same skinny body type. Some Koreans opt not to have plastic surgery and keep their natural facial features like monolid eyes, wide nose, and jaws.
Online protest Escape the Corset, a feminist movement in pursuit of achieving gender equality, surfaces on all of the social media platforms.
Korean women are seen smashing their makeup and cutting their hair short to show protest against this strict beauty standards. Turns out, beyond vanity, the men, the schools, and the workplaces in South Korea are imposing strict beauty standards on women that is hard to keep up.
In Korea, makeup equates to manners. Youtuber Lina Bae revealed the reality behind all this K-beauty craze. Korean women are pressured to put on layers of makeup to conceal their flaws and a corset to achieve a small build to become more socially acceptable. In workplaces, women would be called out for not wanting to put makeup and showing up bare-faced. Contact lenses must be kept all day, even longer than 8 hours (the suggested maximum number of hours a pair must be worn in a day).
While the rest of the world continues to rave about Korean beauty trends, the women of Korea are pressured and are suffering from the societal norms that the world is imposing on them.
“I wish and hope that the future generations live a better life with more freedom and better ideals,” Lina Bae wrote, “Since I am a girl, I am enforced to follow rules, but if I don’t want to I will not wear that corset. That is all about the ideals of the non-corset movement. Someday, I hope for the idea that dressing up will become a choice instead of a must-do job.”
The battle of the women of the world may be different in every nation, but for sure, all of us simply want to escape the suffering from gender inequality. We all adore K-beauty, but for the women of South Korea, beauty is the number one enemy, and so the revolution has begun.
