Chris Duffy

But I use Zoom so often that when I occasionally switch to a different program like Google Meet, I'm shocked and appalled by how rough my unfiltered meeting face is.

Oh, no.

Like that is the real me.

That can't be right.

And that experience is something that Elise talks about a lot in her book, Flawless, the experience of seeing yourself through what she calls the technological gaze.

Elise also talks about skincare, plastic surgery, and most of all, the work that it takes to look a certain way.

These are themes that Elise has been thinking about for her whole life.

We will be right back with more from Elise on how we learn what we are supposed to look like and the work that it takes a person to live up to or push back against those standards.

Don't go anywhere.

Today, we're talking with Elise Hugh, author of the book Flawless, about the work, effort and money that goes into trying to optimize our appearances.

To get us started, I thought I'd read this quote to you on page 68 of the book.

So he said, growing up in white suburban America as the only Asian girl in my classes, I often felt ashamed of my differences and desperate to fit in.

K-beauty's ascendance means that my three daughters experience a culture in which West finally chases East in some aesthetics and pampering rituals, subverting the previous power dynamic.

Talk to me about what you meant when you wrote that, that this was really a powerful shift in the way that you'd seen the world.

You really bring your journalist eye to looking at the ways in which what we think of as beautiful can shift and change and what causes them to shift and change.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up writing a book on Korea.

Growing up in the Midwest and living in the U.S., you had kind of often associated your identity as kind of almost like a pan-Asian identity, right?

Like I'm Asian and that's one identity in the U.S.

And then you get to Seoul and all of a sudden you're not Korean.

You're completely having to reevaluate like how you look, how you fit in and what society looks like and how it looks at you.