Beauty beyond borders: the rise and rise of South Korea’s plastic surgery empire
As plastic surgery becomes normalised in South Korea, platforms such as Gangnam Unni are helping bring in foreign visitors chasing beauty
Last December, a series of plastic surgery ads were splashed on the side of buses and bus stops around Seoul. While this is nothing new for South Korea, a country that accounts for nearly 25 per cent of the global aesthetic surgery market and where nine in every 1,000 people have received some form of alteration, it was the faces of actresses Jeon Jong-seo and Jang Yoon-ju on the posters that caught the attention of many.
Gangnam Unni, responsible for the campaign with the tagline “Accurate information to be beautiful”, is South Korea’s leading beauty and medical information platform that links more than 6.7 million users with 3,700 dermatology and plastic surgery clinics across the country and Japan.
The beauty company is being touted as a potential unicorn start-up, as its parent company, Healing Paper, posted a revenue of nearly US$29 million in 2023 and is entering markets in Japan and Thailand. That same year, it also launched Unni, a multi-language cross-border service allowing patients from 104 countries to access South Korean clinics.
Gangnam is the district in Seoul in the middle of the plastic surgery empire. Unni is Korean for “big sister”. According to the Korean Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, about 55 per cent of the more than 600 plastic surgery clinics in Seoul are concentrated in Gangnam.
As Gangnam Unni’s most recent ad with top actresses has shown, the willingness of South Korean celebrities to be aligned with the industry or open about their experience going under the knife has elevated the image of plastic surgery in the country.
Lee Si-an, a highly popular female contestant from the latest season of Netflix’s Singles Inferno, is one of the many stars who received even more support and interest from fans after she was very comfortable in revealing her past procedures on her face. The fact that she was the most popular contestant on the dating show also signalled a win for plastic surgery clinics.
Lee Kun-hee, president of the Korean Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and a practising surgeon in Seoul, said when ultra-competitiveness emerged in South Korea from the 2000s, people began associating a strong physical appearance to having a competitive edge in society.