By: Philip Gowman

Philip Gowman — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:15:13 +0000

Good point. Not everyone in Korea is a celebrity or beauty queen, but read the articles and they’d have you believe the contrary. Like you, I’ve never come across anyone who admits to having been under the knife. But on a very unscientific comparison of the average person in a Seoul street and the average person in a Tokyo street, I’d rather be watching the passers-by in Seoul… Whether that’s a reflection of greater take-up of surgery or greater natural beauty I really don’t know…

By: frogslayr

frogslayr — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:52:05 +0000

Following your tangent, rather than the main topic, I’m always bemused by those plastic surgery articles. I believe them, yes, not to have fudged the numbers. And yes, that plastic surgery must be popular. But having been brought up in Seoul (and Kangnam at that), it always struck me as odd that, though we assumed (and had verified) that all the celebrities and all the middle class girls get plastic surgery, no one around me had. Of course no one would proclaim such, but even if they were keeping it hush, let’s just say the effects were never visible.
It was like watching beauty pageants when we were in high school and college. The contestants would seem like another species. Who knew them? Who talked to someone like them? Did we see them in school? Sad, such a wide gap between this bewildering media buzz and the boring (and very plain) folks we lived with.

Comments on: Busan, hub city?

By: Philip Gowman

By: frogslayr