CPOY

CPOY 76 International Picture Story Bronze: Painful Beauty

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.

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June 8, 2021
“After the surgery, I tried to commit suicide. I was just so sad so disappointed," Sunmin Lee, 23 years old influencer. Sunmin Lee is one of the young women who did plastic surgery. As a 14-year-old, she underwent her first surgery. Sunmin Lee was an ordinary teenager living in a sleepy suburb to the capital Seoul called Suwon. Here she went to high school. But she was bored. So she started doing trips to Seouls luxurious party district Gangnam. Here she made new friends, and with them she spent the weekends with expensive café trips and visits to exclusive nightclubs.
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