Thursday, May 02, 2013

I stole this

...but I'm willing to credit my sources. I got the following animated GIF from here. A bit of history: the GIF was created by compiling photos from this Imgur gallery: "Korea's plastic surgery mayhem is finally converging on the same face." (The Imgur gallery is itself likely a compilation from elsewhere—possibly here.) Watching the GIF below is sort of hypnotic, and it reveals, in a way that even the static gallery of photos does not, just how similar all those Miss Korea 2013 contestants are. And foreigners have taken note.


Prize comment: "All those different hairstyles look good on her."

Hats off to Seoul Podcast as the one-stop source for the above links.


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3 comments:

Charles said...

It should be noted that a lot of the similarity in those photos comes from the makeup.

Not that this fact takes anything away from the underlying point: that we are converging on a single ideal of "beauty" here.

I saw a (Korean) commercial not too long ago (can't remember what for) that mocked this idea, showing two girls trying to be different and ending up looking exactly like each other, down to the same hairstyles, clothes, makeup, etc. The pitch was probably for something that ostensibly makes girls stand out from the crowd. You know, the old "be unique by doing this thing that everyone else is doing" routine.

Kevin Kim said...

Yeah, I can see how makeup makes a difference, although I still feel that, if we were to think in terms of biometrics, there's a scary similarity between and among these contestants in terms of their respective facial proportions—distance between the eyes, distance from the bottom of the nose to the chin, etc. If we were to draw polygons whose vertices connected important features on each face, then did a person-to-person polygonal comparison, I think we'd see very little change from map to map.

Kevin Kim said...

C,

Just saw the before/after-makeup pics of the Miss Korea 2013 girls (here). I concede you've got a point. Without makeup, the girls do look distinctly different from each other. It's incredible, the extent to which makeup alone can produce such convergence.