[Opinion] The Beauty Market

A joke making the rounds on the Internet goes like this: a potato and a sweet potato are walking together. Then a white-faced rice cake with fair skin passes by. The potato admires her beauty, saying, “Isn’t she gorgeous?” Then the sweet potato argues, “That’s the makeup effect.”

Korean women are famous for their “makeup effect”: a foreign cosmetic company even launched a new product just for Koreans. Following the “metrosexual” trend, referring to men who care about how they look, ordinary office workers are starting to look as handsome as the Korean celebrities famous in Asia, known as Korean Wave stars.

The National Statistical Office announced that each household spends 59,611 won a month on average nationwide for beauty-related accessories, which is five times larger than expenditures on books or publications (10,397 won), which are brain embellishers. Expenditures for school materials or textbooks are categorized as education costs, while those for newspapers, children’s books and study guides belong to books or publications. The monthly newspaper subscription fee is 12,000 won a month, meaning a household hardly buys a book a month. Or it may mean a book is bought a month if there is no newspaper subscription.

The development of the beauty market reflects overly practical mindset. One of the causes the foreign press pinpointed for the “Hwang Woo-suk crisis” was Koreans’ tendency to hurry, or Korea’s “bbali, bbali” culture, meaning an obsession with appearance and its results, neglecting other processes. True beauty-related accessories would soon be effective once used, different from books or publications, which would only be effective once they are read and the knowledge is absorbed. Is the “makeup effect” a strategy to survive in this era when “one’s appearance is a competitive weapon?”

Newsweek dubbed the knowledge revolution as “the issue of 2006.” It said that only countries that gain knowledge quickly would prosper as the scientific revolution speeds up and knowledge spreads. If schools neglect knowledge, and one spends money only on one’s appearance after school, it will cause huge delays in this massive wave. Meanwhile, a brain scientist at Tohoku University in Japan said thoroughly reading newspapers alone would activate the frontal lobe, which is in charge of thinking and memory. Why not jump on the bandwagon of the knowledge revolution by reading a book after training your brain with newspapers?

Kim Sun-duk, Editorial Writer, yuri@donga.com