Le Mee In

I’ve been watching the Korean make-over-show “Let Me In”. The show offers a life changing physical transformation of a participant who will be entitled to an extreme evasive surgery. After he or she had gone under the knife, it would be difficult to trace his or her old self. The ugly duckling had transformed into a swan. The face size had become smaller, the eyes bigger, the nose narrower, the cheeks sharper. Whatever maybe the “defects” can be “fixed” by their talented doctors.

Before the surgery and the “big reveal”, the lives of the participants were featured. It was always a life full of hopelessness, misery, anger, pain, self-loathing and discrimination that was brought by their physical “imperfections”. Most notable of the stories are the daughter who is abused by his father because she looks like her ugly mother who left them, a wife who is being neglected by his husband because she is no longer the attractive woman he married, a young woman who cannot get a job despite her high school grades because she is not “up with the standard of beauty”, a guy who hid in his house for five years because of his large chest, a suicidal girl because she was bullied in school because of her appearance. There are other sob stories that will illicit the sympathy of the audience who had, more than once, had experienced or experiencing the same things.

In defense to the show, it never claimed that it can resolve the problems of the participants. What it promised was “hope”, a “fresh start” to the sufferingparticipants.Not a few will claim that that hope is fleeting and false given that it is from an unnatural process like plastic surgery. But I would say that whatever it is, it is still hope, and it is now up to the participant how he or she will use his or her newly constructed beauty to turn his or her life around.

What can’t be denied, though are the implications in this show. This is when the old-age question “What is the true standard of beauty?” persists. The media being the purveyor of “what is beautiful”, and in Korea that is the K-pop artists and actors. You need to conform to them or else you will not be considered as “beautiful”. What happens now to the celebration of uniqueness and individuality? We are all born different with varied genetic make-up, therefore, there is no certain “mold” of beauty.

But still, forcing yourself on a “mold” which you are made up through dangerous processes like extreme plastic surgery is the individual’s personal decision that others just have to respect. The same equal respect due to those who decided not to alter themselves to “fit in”, without maltreatment and bullying. Hence, a more accepting society must prevail for those who decided to change or not change themselves.

The bottomline of this is a healthy self-image. Once you realized that there is no need to look like the “perceived” epitome of beauty that proliferates the mainstream media to be loved and valued, then that is already a good start for self-acceptance and inevitably, self- esteem.