![\"\"](\"https:\/\/atbs.bk-ninja.com\/suga\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/viviana-rishe-5a5GnXfZSzE-unsplash.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOne evening when I was about 10 years old, I found my mom sitting cross-legged on the living room floor by a lamp. She was gazing at herself in a hand mirror, and an open rectangular box wrapped in red satin with Korean writing on the lid sat nearby. As I got closer, I noticed the box contained several vials and a pack of microneedles.<\/p>\n
Both fascinated and horrified, I observed in silence as my mom dipped the tip of a needle in the serum, and used it to painstakingly prick a dark spot on her face over and over again. She did the same thing to another spot. Then another. When she stopped to stretch her back, my mom asked if I wanted her to use her \u201cspecial medicine\u201d to remove the mole on my cheek. I said no, and ran to my room.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That was 25 years ago, and my mom pays just as much attention to her appearance now as she did then. In my eyes, the way she scrutinizes her looks \u2014 and the way she\u2019s taught me to think about my own \u2014 has a lot to do with the East Asian standards of beauty she grew up with. While all cultures have their own measures of physical attractiveness, South Korea and some of its neighbors set a particularly high bar for women.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s painful to feel \u201cconsistently devalued\u201d by how you look, Mok says. That, in turn, can translate to low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and even body dysphoria. In fact,\u00a0a 2017 study<\/a>\u00a0published in\u00a0International Journal for Equity in Health<\/em>\u00a0found that young Koreans who experienced discrimination based on their physical looks (also called \u201clookism\u201d) were more likely to report poor self-rated health.<\/p>\n For those who do find themselves preoccupied with unrealistic beauty standards and thus feel unhappy about their appearance, Mok suggests working to change your mindset about what beauty looks like by making small but intentional changes, such as rethinking some of your role models or finding spaces where more people look like you. It may also be helpful to address some of the comments you\u2019ve heard from family members or others, if it makes sense culturally to do so.<\/p>\n But, Mok adds, there\u2019s no easy answer to figuring out how to deal with the impact of extreme beauty standards. Everyone\u2019s experience with them is different, spanning an array of cultures and countries. And while there is\u00a0a growing movement<\/a>\u00a0in South Korea, for example, to challenge these long-held standards for women,\u00a0the global popularity of K-beauty products<\/a>\u00a0suggests the expectation to stay flawless is here to stay.<\/p>\n Because those ideals are so deeply ingrained, I expect my mom to also continue working to enhance not only her appearance but mine as well. Recently, at her request, I drove her to a new skincare clinic. A red-headed white woman had apparently recommended the place after my mom had approached her to ask what she\u2019d done to make her skin so white. \u201cYou could hardly see her freckles,\u201d my mom said.<\/p>\n After talking to the skin consultant, we learned the red-headed woman had most likely gotten a chemical peel. My mom turned to me excitedly and asked: \u201cDo you want one too? I\u2019ll pay for it.\u201d<\/p>\n I politely declined.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One evening when I was about 10 years old, I found my mom sitting cross-legged on the living room floor by a lamp. She was gazing at herself in a hand mirror, and an open rectangular box wrapped in red satin with Korean writing on the lid sat nearby. As I got closer, I noticed the box contained several vials and a pack of microneedles. Both fascinated and horrified, I observed in silence as my mom dipped the tip of a needle in the serum, and used it to painstakingly prick a dark spot on her face over and over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioalbatross.in\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}