In South Korea, women are let go of their jobs for not being beautiful enough. Sky-high beauty standards permeate society. No less than a third of all South Korean women between the ages of 19 and 29 undergo plastic surgery. At the same time, the suicide rate among the same age group has risen significantly. The youngsters are growing up in a society that is evolving at an extremely high speed, heavily influenced by the Korean media, the Korean music genre, k-pop, with the seemingly utterly perfect idols and an Instagram feed crammed with beauty influencers.
To a lot of South Korean women, the dream of the perfect exterior begins already in their early teens. Some of the young Korean women receive plastic surgery as a gift from their parents, others as a request or pressure from friends.










