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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Slide 4 of 8
June 17, 2021

To Sunmin Lee, her beauty is paramount. It gives her a better position in the job market, free services and more followers on Instagram, she thinks. Although she actually thinks her dream of perfection and plastic surgery is an ongoing abuse, it is not one she is trying to get out of.

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