One of Porchlight's Business Books of the Year | One of Vox 's Best Books of 2023 | An NPR Book
of the Day | Required Reading from New York Post | One of Nylon 's 13 May Books to Add to Your
Reading List | One of PureWow's 14 Books to Read for AAPI Heritage Month | One of W Magazine 's
14 Books to Dive Into This Summer | One of Betches' Best Summer Reads of 2023 An audacious
journalistic exploration of the present and future of beauty through the lens of South Korea's
booming "K-beauty" industry and the culture it promotes by Elise Hu NPR host-at-large and the
host of TED Talks Daily K-beauty has captured imaginations worldwide by promising a kind of
mesmerizing perfection. Its skincare and makeup products—creams packaged to look like
milkshakes or pandas and snail mucus face masks to name a few—work together to fascinate us
champion consumerism and invite us to indulge. In the four years Elise spent in Seoul as NPR’s
bureau chief the global K-beauty industry quadrupled. Today it's worth $10 billion and is only
getting bigger as it rides the Hallyu wave around the globe. And fun as self-care consumerism
may be Elise turns her veteran eye to the darker questions lurking beneath the surface of this
story. When technology makes it easy to quantify and optimize ourselves—from banishing
blemishes to whittling our waistlines even to shaving down our jaws—where do we draw the
line? What are the dangers for a society where a flawless face and body are promoted and
possible? What are the real financial physical and emotional costs of beauty work in a
culture that valorizes endless self-improvement and codes it as empowerment? With rich
historical context and deep reporting including hours of interviews with South Korean women
this is a complex provocative look at the ways hustle culture has reached into the sinews of
our bodies. It raises complicated questions about gender disparity consumerism the beauty
imperative of an appearance obsessed society and the undeniable political economic and
social capital of good looks worldwide. And it points the way toward an alternative vision one
that's more affirming and inclusive than a beauty culture led by industry.