Aegyo & K-Beauty Start an Underground Movement
When S. Korean Soft Power Comes in Different Colors
There are people in the world being tortured for wearing lipstick or a hairstyle that’s not state approved.
When I was sucked into episodes of the popular K-drama Crash Landing on You, I didn’t think about the parts of it that were real. I didn’t consider that North Korean posters displaying state-approved hairstyles was a real thing.
I didn’t consider cosmetics could inspire change.
That there was a huge black market for cosmetics.
That people could actually be arrested and even tortured for being caught wearing them (and were willing to risk it).
We rarely think of cosmetics as revolutionary. When we study historic rebellions in class, it’s often the hard-power versions we think of, with countries or factions gunning up and going to war.
Soft power is about wielding influence instead of weapons. Soft power can also change the course of entire nations.
What Soft Power Looks Like
When Gandhi gathered the masses to march to the sea and make their own salt to break the British salt monopoly, that was soft power.
When the Indian Ocean sea floor gave way in 2004, it unleashed energy equivalent to 550 million times that of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Over 230,000 people died. When the U.S. waded in with over $96 million in emergency supplies and a massive cadre of expertise toward rebuilding and resilience, that was soft power. I was proud to be part of that.
The post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe? Soft power.
Educational exchanges, diplomatic solutions, infrastructure investments (à la China), cultural influence: all soft power. France is good at that last one. Think of Alliance Française worldwide, spreading French language and culture even beyond its traditional francophone borders.
Another growing soft power contender? South Korea.
Korean Soft Power (Doesn’t Look Like You Think)
The Korean Wave is big. Consider the reach of Korean media. Because it’s pretty family friendly, downright entertaining, and easy to find these days (Netflix, Viki, etc.), you can find fans of K-drama all over the place. One of the North Korean characters in Crash Landing on You was a big semi-secret fan of hard-to-access-there K-drama. It was the tool he used to parse meanings for the South Korean main character’s slang, with some funny results.
A couple of years back, my son and I were holed up in a little maisonette in Rouen, in the northern part of France. What did we watch while we chowed down on whole fresh baguettes, bins of Haribo, and the most delicious melt-in-your-mouth chocolate mousse? (We walked a LOT. Don’t judge.) K-drama.
Girl’s Generation, Blackpink, and EXO. And have you seen the spread of BTS? Even bigger than my bins of Haribo.
Big Hit is capitalizing on this desire for Korean culture in how it does business. Its I-LAND K-pop reality show had a huge worldwide audience and ended in the debut of ENHYPEN, featuring Jay, Heeseung, Ni-Ki, Jungwon, Sunghoon, Jake, and Sunoo. (Here you can tell they’re lipsyncing, but I swear they sing really well. There’s no doubt they dance well.)
Now there’s Big Hit Japan. I-LAND veterans K, EJ, Kyungmin, Nicholas, and Ta-ki and some soon-to-be-auditioned others will form a new group with an international audience in mind. The group itself is international: 2 from Japan, 2 from Korea, 1 from Taiwan. Again — expanding Korean cultural influence.
So the market for Korean media is already huge. So is international interest in K-beauty. South Korea’s skincare regimen is becoming legendary, and the growing global market reflects that.
That interest has filtered into North Korea, where people risk imprisonment and torture to smuggle or use the products. The freedom implicit in a pretty lipstick is influencing how women in North Korea approach daily life. Some start asking why they can’t have something that simple and pretty and wind up taking great risks to make a circuitous journey across the line.
It’s created an underground resistance based on the attraction of the Korean Wave. And that’s a different and powerful version of soft power.
[If you thought this was interesting or just want to be a wonderful, encouraging person, please click on Clap! Or if you have any thoughts or ways I could make it better, please Comment and share those too. Thanks for reading!]
