Star Wars Clone Wars has become surprisingly real in Korea. The most popular plastic surgeries (V-line jaw contouring, rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, facial fillers/Botox) are now nearly identical faces for men and women. Clinics market the same idol package across genders. Plastic surgery feels like everyone getting the same face. Same lips. Same jaw. Same nose. Even clinics now offer face packages.
Witness protection is easy in South Korea.
Clinics like View Plastic, ID Hospital, and AB Plastic heavily promote these exact combos in 2025–2026 as the K-pop idol look.
South Korea population is about 51.6 million
Total South Korea Women is 25.8 million
1 in 5 Korean women (20%) have had at least one plastic surgery procedure in their lifetime. This is over 5 million women.
For women aged 19–29, over 33% have had plastic surgery reported and it may be as high as 50% in Seoul.
Men in Korea is only about 15% of the market but this is rising fast among 20s males chasing the soft flower-boy/idol version.
Gangnam district alone has 400+ specialized clinics.
K-pop agencies routinely fund or require these procedures for trainees.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Plastique mating with plastique yields just as many Toads it ever did. Fixing the face doesn’t rearrange the genes. Imagine that. You find the perfect guy (or girl), plan a life, have the first kid, and out pops … a Toad. L O L ! ! !
They will pay for dozens of plastic surgeries to fix the look of any children. IF they got over their own narcissm enough to have children. Which rarely happens in Korea at 0.6 TFR in seoul and 0.8-1.2 across much of Asia.
Soon the most high class act will be NOT getting any surgery.
To be your natural self with gray hairs and all will be the one privileged, eccentric stance.
Sure, as plastic surgery gets better and more widely accepted, I suppose it will become harder to tell people apart; A lot of what makes one face distinguishable from another are features that actually detract from how attractive somebody is. It might be that there are a very limited number of local maxima for attractiveness, if you relentlessly tweak people’s faces to look better.
It’s an interesting thought that, in a world where everybody’s attractive, you might have trouble telling one person from another.
Luckily, Brett, you and I are already irresistable by nature.
Police sketches are going to be useless. ‘Can you describe the suspect?’ ‘Well, officer, he was incredibly symmetrical, had a perfect brow ridge, and looked exactly like the other forty thousand people in this zip code.