TED Talks Daily
How to Be a Better Human: How to embrace – and challenge – the idea of "beauty" (w / Elise Hu)
04 Jul 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, everyone. Elise Hu here. We have something a little different for you today, an episode of How to Be a Better Human, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. On the show, comedian Chris Duffy interviews guests about the big ideas and small changes that can improve our lives.
Recently, Chris and I sat down to talk about shifting beauty ideals, our increasingly visual world, and other ideas from my new book, Flawless, which just came out. If you enjoy this conversation, please check out How to Be a Better Human wherever you're listening to this.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. In today's episode, we're going to switch things up a little bit. We're going to question some of the assumption behind our title, that we should always be trying to improve ourselves. Look, becoming thoughtful, kinder, emotionally aware and mature, those seem like clearly good things.
Definitely worth trying to be a better human on those fronts. But there can be an insidious side to the idea of better. The idea that we always have to be optimizing and improving ourselves, that we're never just enough. That is not healthy. And that is what today's guest, journalist and author Elise Hu often found in her exploration of global beauty culture.
Elise had a special focus in her book on South Korea, but this is really an issue that is worldwide. And like in so many other aspects of society, technology has accelerated and exaggerated global beauty standards and expectations. A small personal experience with this. I take almost all of my remote meetings on Zoom.
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Chapter 2: How have beauty standards evolved in the digital age?
And when I'm on Zoom, I have the touch up my appearance feature enabled. So my skin's a little smoother and clearer. The bags under my eyes are lightened. 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.
I had to have been seven or eight years old, and I never watched Chinese soap operas. But my parents' friends would come over for mahjong or dinner parties a lot, and they would be like, oh, you look like a little Liu Xuehua. And I didn't know who Liu Xuehua was, but they would say Shuangyanpi, Shuangyanpi, which means, and in Korean it's Sangapool, so it's similar. And it means double eyelid.
So only half Asians are born with the crease above the eyelid. And a lot of Koreans are born without them. And so many will go and get the double eyelid surgery. I am Taiwanese American on one side, Chinese American on the other. And It's desirable for all Northeast Asians or has been for a long time.
Chapter 3: What role does technology play in shaping our perceptions of beauty?
And so even when I was very young, I internalized this idea that, oh, I need to have the double eyelid that almost all white people have, but only half Asian people have. And I had no idea who this star was. But when I saw her on the VHS tapes, it helped me realize, oh, this is what I'm supposed to look like.
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.
Hey, I'm Elise Hugh. I'm a journalist, podcaster. I'm the host of TED Talks Daily and an author of a book called Flawless.
To get us started, I thought I'd read this quote to you on page 68 of the book.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, I grew up wanting to be white. My idea of what it meant to be American was to be blonde haired and blue eyed. And largely that's because I grew up in the Midwest. And I didn't realize that there was so much diversity in America because I was in suburban St. Louis. And what I say about St.
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Chapter 4: How does the K-beauty industry influence global beauty standards?
Louis is that even the salad bars are white. Like when you go to a salad bar at the grocery store in St. Louis, so that would be a Dearberg's or Schnucks for my fellow St. Louisans. The pasta salads are all mayo-laden pasta salads. The cheese is Provel cheese, which is this mix of provolone and mozzarella. The lettuce is iceberg. And so even the salad bars were white.
And I just grew up feeling my difference constantly and just really wanting to be like all the other girls who weren't Asian, who didn't have immigrant parents, who didn't eat the weird foods that we ate and have the traditions that... that we had and I wanted to go to church because they all went to church and we didn't. And it's really amazing.
Now I have three Asian daughters and their classes look like mini UNs. The kids are in Southern California, so it's obviously always been quite diverse. But their reality is so different in that now it's a lot more culturally cool to be Asian. You know, they are not only seeing representations of themselves, in media, in film, in television.
But Korean beauty and standards like glowiness, dewiness, the look of K-pop stars is something that everybody wants to aspire to, even those blonde girls that I was so desperate to be more like when I was little.
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.
So I had been a journalist in the U.S.
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Chapter 5: What personal experiences shaped the guest's views on beauty?
for all of my adult career and was working for NPR in Washington, D.C. in late 2014 when I had this epiphany that I did not want to be going to book parties in Washington, D.C. or in Bethesda for the rest of my adult life.
So I went to the bosses at NPR and they said, we're going to shut down the Afghanistan Bureau and we need to open up in a place where we've never had coverage before, Northeast Asia. So it would be coverage of both Koreas, North Korea and South Korea, as well as Japan. And they said, well, it's posted in Seoul, so you would have to live in Seoul. And I was like, you know what? Let's do it.
In early 2015, after I was newly pregnant with my second daughter, we packed up. It was my husband, my two-year-old, my elderly beagle, and two cats. We got on a plane and we flew to Seoul and relocated there and lived there for four years.
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 what was so powerful was how much you are instantly judged by your appearances when you get to Korea. I'm 5'9", so I'm taller than the average woman anywhere, maybe, except for Nordic countries. And I wear a size 8, and I think that's normal size, but I would walk up and down the streets in Korea in front of stores that had larger size clothing, and people would just yell at me, large size.
You are made... very aware of your difference very quickly.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of societal beauty expectations?
And then, you know, it is a norm in Korea to essentially make a comment about your appearance. So if I hadn't seen you in a while, Chris, I might say, wow, Chris, you look tired. Or Chris, you've lost weight. Or Chris, what happened to your hair? Or Chris, you've grown a beard. Like, these are the first things that you say to people.
And so... Yeah, these are all the same first things that my mom says to me as well.
Right. So it's a land where everyone is your mom.
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.
That's because it was the first comment that people would make as something that I could fix. So what happens is, and one of the big themes of Flawless is that our adherence to beauty culture, and I describe beauty culture as basically a cousin to diet culture. So it is a kind of...
way of tying appearance to worth and appearance to value and appearance to professional and personal currency so if you look good then you are good and if you are working on your looks then you are hard working and so if you're not working on your looks then you're seen as lazy or incapable
One of the big themes that comes out of the book is this notion of labor, that the work that we do on our bodies is work, but we adhere to beauty culture so much that it's cloaked in empowerment or choice. But really, it does cost time and energy and resources, and those are important levers of our freedom.
And when I'm spending time trying to remove freckles or offered ways to remove freckles, then my mind and my energy isn't directed elsewhere.
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Chapter 7: How can we challenge harmful beauty standards?
And so what was so pronounced to me about the freckles was not only that they would point out the freckles, but they would say, you can fix that. Why wouldn't you fix that? This is an option. It would be a logical choice for you to remove those spots on your face. And they think that about everything else that is deemed outside of the standard, right? Wrinkles. Why wouldn't you fix that?
Hey, you have creases on your forehead. We can take care of that. So it's all wrapped up in this notion of consumerism and hard work and the market.
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.
And in South Korea, if you ignore this reality, it actually has a cost. It is a place where photoshopping your passport photos comes by default. It's a place where headshots were required on resumes. And so Korean women are accurately perceiving That if they fail to be thin or beautiful, whatever beautiful means at the moment, it will literally cost them.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can individuals take to redefine beauty?
And I think that it's true in the U.S. too. It does cost us. We obviously have far more diversities, but it is also economically rational for an American or anybody in any developed country to sort of devote time to beauty.
beautifying ourselves because it helps with dating right i mean we're on dating apps that are highly visual it helps with presenting yourself if you're in a competitive situation against another job candidate it might not be explicit it might not be like please put your photo on your resume and be five seven and be under 120 pounds or whatever it is but still we do make judgments on other people's appearance constantly
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. It's just exhausting.
How do we handle like wanting to change this on the one hand and also wanting to recognize the reality that it can make us more successful on the other? How do we not buy in, but also not burn out?
Just as we shouldn't combat fatphobia by demanding that everybody be skinny, which is something that we're kind of seeing now that Ozempic and other diet drugs are becoming more and more popular.
And just as the way to combat homophobia isn't just wishing or trying to get everybody to be straight, I don't think the way to combat lookism or appearance-based discrimination is for everybody to be beautiful by whatever today's reigning standards are. Culturally, that's not the way to address it.
And so what we need to do is change our self-concept in a far more nuanced way to break the link between appearance and worth. The big problem, of course, is always like these are big systemic problems that we shouldn't demand that we individually change. But at the same time, I think individual changes can ripple outward into our circles of influence.
And especially as a mother of girls, I don't want them to grow up with the same baggage that I grew up with. And my baggage about my appearance is often, like everybody else's, passed down by my mother and hers was passed down by her mother. And so one thing that I think about is how can I be a good ancestor?
Like, if I don't want my girls or the next generation of women and girls and boys to grow up with the same anxieties about their looks... And then I don't want the people who are on the margins, people who might be bigger or less smooth or less firm or whatever is outside the norm, I don't want them to continue to suffer from being marginalized.
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