Elise Hu’s description, quoted in the headline, of how beauty culture upholds systemic oppression—or the -isms—has stuck with me since I first read the words in The Atlantic as I prepped to interview her for Slate’s gender and feminism podcast The Waves. Lookism, the exclusion or mistreatment of someone because they aren’t considered conventionally attractive, is intricately interwoven with deservedness, time inequity, economic mobility, and the brute force of late-stage capitalism—or the commodification of, well, everything. Hu’s new book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, takes a deep journalistic look at these systems and how our desire to be beautiful further fuels them. This excerpt from the show has been edited for length and clarity.
Julia Craven: One recurring theme in the book that I found incredibly relatable was the labor of being beautiful and how time-consuming and exhausting it is to be a woman who is expected to chase these unattainable beauty ideals—as if we could ever catch them anyway. To me, it gave hustle culture; it gave “wake up and grind” vibes. And you mentioned in the book that this fuels burnout among young people in Korea.
Elise Hu: Whether it's primping, or plucking, or waxing, or shaving, or dieting, or researching products to buy, or making appointments, and figuring out which med spot to go to. This is a lot of time that we are spending on aesthetic labor. It's not just labor that we are doing for free. It's labor that we're actually paying to do. And I think so many of us just passively participate because we've been doing it since we were teenage girls. And then it's also sold to us as empowerment so often.
All of this struck me as very capitalistic, especially the ideal face, since you have to conform if you want to acquire capital, which is another time suck. But we see this parallel broadly; we see it in Korea, the U.S. and other countries. What does this say about our society's desire for ownership over well-being?
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