Journalist, podcaster, and author Elise Hu joins us to discuss her background with modeling and disordered eating, why beauty culture is a cousin of diet culture, Elise’s experience with intense beauty standards in Korea, and the realities of pushing back against performances of femininity.
Behind the paywall, Christy and Elise discuss the rise of K-Beauty globally, problematic K-Pop body ideals, the lack of mental health support in many Asian countries, and how the technological gaze is reshaping beauty standards online and around the world.
The first half of this episode is available to everyone. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Elise Hu is a journalist, podcaster, author and most recently, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Currently she’s the host of TED Talks Daily, the flagship podcast from TED conferences. You can also hear her as the co-host of Forever 35 and the host of Raising Us.
Elise previously worked as a TV correspondent at VICE News and a host and correspondent for the radio and digital network NPR. Between 2015 and 2018, she spent lots of time on planes, trains and automobiles as an international correspondent and NPR’s first-ever Seoul bureau chief. She returned to the US in fall 2018 to explore the future through a video show, Future You with Elise Hu.
An honors graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism, Elise’s work has earned a duPont-Columbia award, a Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, a National Edward R. Murrow award for best online video, a Gracie Award for hosting, a Webby award for podcasting, and The Austin Chronicle once dubiously named her the “Best TV Reporter Who Can Write.”
Her book, FLAWLESS, came out in 2023. It’s a non-fiction exploration of beauty, consumerism, and womanhood.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
@elisewho on IG
Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu
Elise’s TED Talk: How digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: I want to talk about beauty culture, the technological gaze, and your book Flawless, which is all about the rise of K-beauty and the years you spent living in Korea. But first I’d love to hear about your background and how you came to do this work.
Elise Hu: I am a longtime journalist. I’ve been a journalist my entire adult life. I am the daughter of Chinese and Taiwanese American immigrants. I grew up in pretty lily white suburbs, St. Louis and then outside of Dallas in a town called Plano, and then went to school for broadcast journalism at the University of Missouri and have been just a curious observer of culture and politics and the economy and all of that and get to ask people intrusive questions for a living. So it’s been super fun.
I found my way to Seoul, South Korea as a foreign correspondent about 10 years ago in 2015 when I was posted there as NPR’s first bureau chief for the Koreas and Japan. So it’s a really vibrant time and one in which I’m still getting to live and talk about. So it’s pretty special that that particular four year spell of my life then ended up being so generative.
Christy Harrison: From the book, it really seems like there’s so much going on in beauty culture in Korea that has translated to the US or prefigured some of what’s happening here. But you also had some intense experiences with diet and beauty culture many years before going to Korea. Like when you were growing up in Texas and started modeling and that pretty quickly spiraled into disordered eating and over exercise. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Elise Hu: Yeah, so I grew up in the 90s. So first of all, the backdrop of this is the 17 magazines and monoculture of television 90s and now upon review, especially with works like Girl on Girl by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, the 90s was a very difficult time for women, a pretty misogynistic time in which our media and a lot of our cultural signifiers sexualized women in a way that was kind of pornographic even and it showed up on runways and it showed up in editorial spreads and magazines. Heroin chic was cool. I remember growing up and a lot of other teenage girls having that Kate Moss quote, the model Kate Moss, on their mirrors and on their refrigerators saying, “Nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels.”
And I think that was kind of the early Internet and chat rooms where pro anorexia chat rooms were coming about. And so this was the milieu in which I was coming up. But I largely escaped it. Like I in middle school and even in the first half of high school didn’t think that much about my body at all. I was pretty disembodied, in fact, for good and for ill. So the good way, the sort of fortunate way, was that I wasn’t one of the middle school dieters that I was surrounded by when I was in middle school.
But in my junior year of high school, I rather accidentally got scouted and got signed to a modeling agency in Dallas. And right away they were focused on my body and started asking me questions like, are you working on your body? Oh, if you are going on a vacation, be sure to only eat fruits and vegetables and all of these kinds of things. Adults in my life who I saw as authority figures were placing judgments on my body. The standards that models had to sort of adhere to at the time were very specific. It was really specific bust, waist and hip measurements. And because I don’t really want to be triggering, I’m not going to say specifically what they were.
But I then very quickly went from not having to think about my body or just not being conscious of it at all to being hyper fixated on it. And so then I read all the magazines and really started applying my perfectionistic tendencies at the time to my body and how to regiment and regulate it and got really good at that and it slipped into disordered eating by my senior year of high school. It was very obvious, I think, to a lot of people around me. And though I didn’t really find a way out of it or find help for that until I went off to college.
It really spiraled into a real kind of alienation and isolation, I think that a lot of folks who have battled eating disorders will describe because it takes over your brain. It’s almost like a brain worm where you don’t think about anything else. So I went through this period of like, no concern to hyper concern to disordered eating, and then got a lot of help. My family was helpful. My school environment was helpful in that there were counselors and therapists, and I got a nutritionist. I took a break from school to heal.
And I really thought that after I healed from this period in my life in my disordered eating that I was sort of done with it. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Well, that year was rough, weird. I gained all my weight back and everything and really didn’t think about it for a long time, probably until I moved to Korea. And this is what ties back into my time in Korea, which is I was suddenly thrust into a world in which everybody was my modeling agent. Everybody was making comments about my body and saying, like, oh, do you don’t want to eat that? Or you can get a shrink wrap for your weight, your post baby weight, and you can fix your freckles. And there were just lots of ways to avail myself of corrections and ways to fix my body and have it meet certain standards. Even though by then I was way out of any sort of image conscious field at all.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting cause you talk in the book about after recovery, sort of just probably for self preservation reasons, just not going into that at all, not worrying about how you looked, not thinking about changing your body size or shape or being too into beauty culture and just kind of like shutting it out, which I think has its benefits. But also, as you say in the book, you sort of missed out on maybe sort of a cultural analysis of it from that perspective too.
Elise Hu: Right, right. I think that I sort of needed to, after my experience, I sort of needed to just eschew all body surveillance or anything that would slip me back down a track of aggressive body surveillance or hypervigilance or anything like that.
Christy Harrison: I feel the same. I mean, I’m recovered from an eating disorder as well and I work with clients now who are in recovery. And I think that’s so protective to just shut it all out and try to create your own bubble of body positivity or body neutrality or whatever it might be, body liberation, and just to not go there, not engage with that culture, that self surveillance. But it’s really, really hard in our culture now. I think it probably was easier at the time, I would imagine, to avoid so much of it in your face. Because now we have it 24/7 in our phones, just constantly calling to us.
Elise Hu: Right. And now, upon further review, and now that I’m 43 and I was really inundated with beauty culture and body culture in Korea, I take the opposite view. I probably shouldn’t have been so avoidant of my demons because it was actually really getting introspective and examining the waters in which we swim that really helped me get comfortable and recover fully. Because just avoiding all of our persistent signals in the culture about how we’re supposed to look and not even avoiding but denying it and sort of like pretending that it didn’t exist didn’t help me as a journalist or as a human contribute to how I can solve or how I can address or help others in this big battle that we live in.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s right.
Elise Hu: I actually think I’m doing my best work now as a journalist and sort of fighting for bodily liberation and autonomy. Having had this experience of delving back into the things that really scared me and that I was trying to avoid.
Christy Harrison: It’s a moment in time for many people to create that bubble for themselves, but then inevitably, something is gonna pierce that bubble. The culture will find its way in and so to have some way of dialoguing with or pushing back on or making sense of that culture, I think is really important for ongoing recovery and sustaining it because we can’t just hide forever, unfortunately. And especially the more people fall outside of the culturally conditioned norms and the expectations for bodies in whatever culture they find themselves in, the worse it is and the harder it is to escape that. So I think having some sort of analysis of it is protective as well.
I want to talk about beauty culture and your definition of beauty culture, because you describe it as basically a cousin to diet culture, which I think is great and very apt, and I would say maybe a cousin as well to wellness cult culture. At the broadest level, what is beauty culture? How do you define it? How does it affect our view of ourselves?
Elise Hu: First of all, I think of culture as the way we do things here. So sort of like, this is the way things are around here. And so a lot of us and all over the world live in a broader beauty culture, or we are parts of regions or countries that are sort of subsumed by beauty culture. And I would describe it as a general sort of way of life way of thinking in which your looks are framed as a matter of personal responsibility. And if you fail, it’s a kind of personal failing.
So in beauty cultures, our looks get situated as a matter of personal choice. So this gets really conflated with the consumerism and capitalism that we’re in. Western society and wanting to look a certain way. There’s also Eastern societies and wanting to look a certain way. But for both sides of the planet, places in which having good looks are framed as our responsibility, I would consider beauty cultures.
Christy Harrison: I like that definition. That’s very succinct and simple. And in Korea, it sounds like the pressures from beauty culture were so intense and the expectation of looking a certain way was so suffused throughout society that it just led to all kinds of discrimination and stigma and unfair treatment of people. Can you talk a little bit about what you observed in Korea, the intense beauty standards and pressures you encountered and how that both challenged your recovery and also how you saw it affect people there?
Elise Hu: Yeah, well, there’s a whole 300 page book on it so let me just use this opportunity if you’re interested in these topics and what I found in Korea to check out Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. But just to give you the CliffsNotes version, what was so eye opening for me was just the open commentary and the open discrimination on the basis of our looks. And there’s actually a term for it that is rarely used in the English language, but often used in Korea: Lookism.
So just like all the other isms, racism or sexism, it’s discrimination based on our looks. And that would happen so commonly that there was a lot of self policing and people who wouldn’t go out without wearing a face mask. This is pre-Covid or not even leave their apartments at all if they weren’t already done up. They didn’t have a certain amount of makeup and their makeup on or their hair wasn’t perfect.
Christy Harrison: Even to like a convenience store in their building, you said, which just blew my mind.
Elise Hu: Correct. And I found Korea to be very gendered in a way that I wasn’t used to because in the US which is such a pluralistic, multicultural society, I feel like our lines of cleavage in society tend to be around race or class, but not as much on gender. I mean, obviously there’s all sorts of sexism in the US too. But because 97% of Korea is Korean, it’s Korean people, then the social dividing line is really between men and women. And as a result, people sort of pointed out my differences constantly and were surprised that I was in leadership positions. I was often asked, where’s your boss? Or where’s the bureau chief? Or this needs to go through the bureau chief. And I’d have to assert, no, I am in charge, I am the boss. Because an Asian appearing woman couldn’t possibly be the one who was in charge in the assumptions of the people that I ran into.
There was a lots of persistent commentary about how to improve my looks because the thing about South Korea is it is the most sophisticated aesthetic market in the world, both for skin care and cosmetics, but also for plastic surgery. So you can avail yourself. There was a real democratization of how to fix yourself. Self improvement technologies as I call them. And so because you could easily pay for that facial or that treatment or that injectable or that surgery, why wouldn’t you? So it was one of those like, hey, if there’s the technology to do it, why wouldn’t you do it? Why wouldn’t you pay for that? And so I was constantly being asked why I wasn’t getting my freckles removed.
Christy Harrison: You’re made to feel that was a problem for the first time in life.
Elise Hu: Yes. And then when I went shopping, my size was always a problem because clothes come in something called free size. And I actually have a chapter called “Free size isn’t free” because it was a very specific size, like a women’s size four or two and if you didn’t fit in it, that was it. There wasn’t anything you could buy in that store. So very constraining and marginalizing, I would say.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, completely. I mean, the weight stigma inherent in that. I think about stores, there’s a few stores in the US that have that, where everything is “one size.” And the one size is tiny. But that’s the subject of a lot of debate and scrutiny and sort of rightly called out in many circles as being very weight stigmatizing and body negative. And there’s such an impetus to, again from some circles, because obviously some brands have shrunk and their plus size lines are done away with them or whatever. But for the most part, I think most mainstream brands do have plus size options and they’re relatively inclusive in their sizing. Often could be better, often could go higher on the spectrum, but it’s there.
And again, also in stores, maybe not so much, but at least there’s a range of more than just one size in the stores. And it sounds like in Korea, that’s just not really seen or there are specific, like big and tall kind of, stores that you would have to go to to shop for your size.
Elise Hu: And it was always around the US Military base because it was like, oh, those huge Americans.
Christy Harrison: Big size, big size, big size.
Elise Hu: I actually had big size, big size sort of yelled at me by storekeepers when I was walking down the street. So, yeah, I really went through it. And to be fair, so do a lot of other people who are larger than a size four.
Christy Harrison: There have to be many people in Korea who are larger than a size four so it seemed like there was just so much apologizing for or just taking it as a given almost that this was the way things were. And you had a quote from a beauty entrepreneur who said essentially, you could look at this overwhelming beauty pressure as a negative thing, or you can look at it as a really interesting or creative side of Korea that makes the beauty industry grow faster. That just depressed me so much, that quote. And I’m curious to hear sort of your response to that and just like the sense of was there any pushback on this intense beauty culture? Was there critique of the weight stigma inherent in free size or was that very much a tiny part of the discourse?
Elise Hu: It was a tiny part of the discourse, but things have certainly changed. Ten years ago, there were no plus size models in Korea. It just didn’t exist. But around the period after MeToo and the women’s rights rallies and the women’s rights sort of movement and consciousness raising that really happened among feminists in Korea in 2018, the year that I was moving home, things have really begun to change more and more, especially thanks to Instagram and a lot of people on social media being willing to be visible at any size or at whatever size they’re at. That has led to, for the first time, now there are plus size models in Korea. There’s more inclusiveness when it comes to sizing.
There’s more inclusiveness when it comes to the shades of foundation that you can buy of BB cream and tinted moisturizer. I remember shopping for BB cream, which is the all in one sunscreen, cover up moisturizer that is so popular and ubiquitous in Asia. I remember shopping for BB cream and there just wasn’t any in my shade. I am an Asian American, but I am darker than a lot of folks in Korea. And so basically I just would have to put on stuff that made me whiter that wasn’t my shade. And so that has now changed.
There have been more entrepreneurs and there’s just been more, I think, interest in Korean beauty that has had a positive effect, I think, or a more inclusive effect on the industries there or some of the brands that are now just opening up the possibility for, hey, maybe a little bit more color and larger sizes. So there is some movement because of market demand, but because previously K-beauty companies and K-fashion was just catering to the domestic market, the industries could actually have the domestic consumer base cater to them, like change their bodies, or make sure that their skin color stayed within a certain range. And now it’s the other way around. Because as the audience is getting more global and more diverse, these companies are having to diversify in order to meet their customer demands.
So there is some change I think. It is not as fast and not as broad as I would like to see, but women and some activist-y men inside Korea are pushing for change and snapping back and I love to see it. There was this big campaign to get rid of a lot of before and after imagery in the subway station of plastic surgery. Because plastic surgery ads were just pasted all over. They were everywhere, floor to ceiling lit up ads of before and afters. People got various procedures, especially in Gangnam, which was the self improvement quarter or what they called plastic Surgery Street. And so you would get off the subway and just be inundated with images of how you were supposed to look and how people looked before and how they looked “so much better.”
And a lot of folks decided to campaign against that and push for the removal of those ads. And those have since been removed. And there’s regulation around it. So there is some change. And I feel like Korea was really just a canary in the coal mine. I did so much of this reporting ten years ago now. And the thesis of Flawless is essentially that, hey, the future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed.
And I hate to say that that thesis holds so many of the procedures and so many of that beauty culture attitude of situating our looks as a matter of personal choice and technological optimization that has actually come about not just in celebrity culture in the US but now with so much improvement and sort of the cheaper, less invasive procedures that are available in the U.S.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And the sort of idea of empowerment, that it’s not just self objectification or going along with the male gaze and trying to make oneself better in that light, but also for Korean women and even families as well, who would pressure their daughters to fit a certain ideal. Looking a certain way was the ticket to a good job, a good marriage, a happy life. So many things that people want in life and the sort of the basics that I mean that we all deserve really, like happiness and fulfillment and a sense of purpose and all of that stuff was very much tied to looks. And looks felt like a ticket to that.
Elise Hu: Absolutely. We have tangled up health and happiness with good looks. And I put this at the foot of hyper capitalism because beauty and beauty culture is really tied to hyper capitalism. And the idea of selling us things. We problematize bodies that don’t fit and then create a market for the solution. And it feels so immovable to confront an industry that markets to kids now or creeps into new areas for growth. Seoul was just a window to sort of time travel forward in a lot of that. And it allows us to look deeper at it.
And I think, as I said at the outset of this conversation, looking deeper at it, let’s not be scared, let’s bravely look more deeply at this, because it is precisely because I analyzed it and I really sort of sat with all of this and I sat with myself longer in front of the mirror, that really led to my own, at least, emotional liberation.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, it’s so hard to do right in a culture where there is such intense pressure. I mean, it sounds like for you, as an outsider there, you had a little bit of an out. You weren’t expected to be like everybody else, because you weren’t like everybody else. You came from a different place and did different things. And so you were able to opt out maybe a little more easily than some of the people there. I was really struck by The Escape the Corset Movement. Those activists were very brave and they were giving up so much to do that, to take that stand and were sort of publicly ridiculed and lost a lot.
Elise Hu: They were disowned by their families. They were not invited to holiday gatherings anymore because they decided they didn’t want to appear feminine just because they didn’t want to have long hair or wear skirts. There was one girl who told me her mom wanted her to appear feminine and sort of wear femininity so much that she offered to pay her to wear a skirt. And every day that she would wear a skirt, her mom would be like, I will give you X amount of money.
There’s such pressure to perform femininity. And I think that we really have to peel back the layer of the onion and remember that this is a performance. And just as much as women are asked to perform femininity, it’s not good for men who then have to perform a certain kind of masculinity that is also constraining for them. So I’m a feminist for men. I’m a feminist for everyone, so that we can live the way that we truly are and want to express ourselves.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. The K-pop ideal, the K-pop idols have been such a huge cultural export. And K-pop is everywhere now and you make the very good point in the book that the K-pop body ideal is shockingly thin. And there are performers who have talked about the extremely low weight requirements they had to meet and the starvation diets they had to undergo just to try to meet them and the real suffering that they went through to try to look a certain way and meet these ideals.
And it’s not really just the artists who suffer, but it’s also the public, the fans who get served these images of K-pop idols that are so unrealistic and basically, as you make the point, essentially pro anorexia content and that leads to them getting served actual pro ana-content by the algorithm, not to mention just the unrealistic standard that these K-pop idols perpetuate and wanting to look like your favorite K-pop idol or band or whatever can be really detrimental to especially young people. Can you talk about the state of diet culture and eating disorders and eating disorder treatment, such as it is in Korea, and how those ideals and sort of disorder behaviors are getting exported along with K-pop and Korean culture in general?
Elise Hu: In Asian cultures broadly, there is a real stigma around mental health.
