Negative Impact of Lookism in Korean Culture

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Negative Impact of Lookism in Korean culture There are various types of discriminations that have been heavily dealt among the people in different types of culture and society. For instance, the discriminations such as Racism, colorism and ageism are the well known ones that have been most commonly issued. However many people are still not much familiar or aware with a type of discrimination called, ‘lookism’ despite of its fast growing influences in many parts of our society. And Korea is one of the places where the lookism has a crazy strong impact on all over the society, and it has become a serious social problem especially due to the reason that it is affecting too much at workplace or during the job employments. Historically, the term lookism was first mentioned in Washington Post Magazine in 1978, explained as the prejudice or discrimination toward people based on the physical appearance.(Ayto) Also from the ancient time, Korean people had a strong belief in physiognomy which contains the idea of lookism. It basically interprets a person’s personality, potential luck or destiny based on the features of outer appearance, especially the faces. For example, a person who has a big earlobe was considered to be a man of virtue and a person who has a wide forehead was thought to be successful in the future and some people even believe they can change their luck or fate by changing the facial feature through the plastic surgery.(Lee) And the idea of Lookism has even brought a huge plastic surgery boom in Korea. The general definition of plastic surgery is “the correction or restoration of form and function of the body such as removing scars, burn injuries or deformed features due to the unfortunate accidents”(Kita) However in Korea, it is mostly considered as the surgery for cosmetic or aesthetic purpose because mostly, people are taking the
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