Elise Hu > Quotes

“We constantly absorb messages that aesthetic self-improvement will make us feel empowered and good about ourselves. But it's so often a mirage. What an isolating feeling, doing all this unsatisfying, unrecognized labor.”
― Elise Hu, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital

“Beauty, “in the form of cosmetics products and cosmetic surgery,” researcher Sharon Heijin Lee writes, “is one of [Korea’s] most profitable export industries, even economically outpacing its manufacturing and shipbuilding industries, the two industries upon which the Korean economy was first built.”
― Elise Hu, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital

“As the rest of the modern world develops into what Seoul already has been for years—an image-laden, social-media-driven landscape, where digital representations of us can be automatically filtered to have longer lashes or poreless skin, and digital makeup can be instantly applied before we show up on our video meetings—it makes clear Korea’s looks-obsessed culture, where appearance norms inch further and further out of reach, isn’t some anomaly.”
― Elise Hu, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital

“By the 2000s, however, popular culture and market interests wielded a certain control and power of their own. In showing and repeatedly setting examples of a standard Korean beauty ideal, media and marketing pushed an appearance regime that consumers learned to enforce on themselves. These days, consumer beauty culture has a way of convincing us that the reigning look is what we wanted all along. Women can conscript our bodies all on our own, no state intervention required.”
― Elise Hu, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital