Chris Duffy

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.

And so... Yeah, these are all the same first things that my mom says to me as well.

Yes.

It's interesting to think about all the ways in which

visual identity, the way that we look to other people, that things can go from being invisible to us, something we've never noticed or thought about, certainly never been insecure about, to all of a sudden being hyper aware of.

You talk about how in Korea, you all of a sudden became very aware of the fact that you have freckles.

In some ways, when you go to another country and when you're living in another culture, it lets you see things with fresh eyes, including yourself.

The idea that in the U.S.

there is a premium that is paid to people who are visually attractive, right?

That life is easier, that it's easier to get a job, that people treat you better, that people view you as more competent or desirable or morally good.

Life is easier if people think you look good.

You know, reading the book and thinking about all of the work, the mental work, the actual time and labor, and then the cost that goes into making oneself try to meet these kind of, in some ways, unattainable beauty standards.