K-Pop Ruined My Self-Image, Here’s How I Fixed It

K-Pop is one of the most renowned music genres currently sweeping the globe. The fans are intense, the industry harsh. Like every industry, behind sunny smiles and flawless music videos are damaging standards and expectations, ones which severely impacted my self-image as a fan. Throughout my teenage years, I struggled with body image issues, skin whitening, and self-hate for my South Asian identity. While I wouldn’t attribute this solely to K-Pop, it was a huge contributing factor that ate at me for years. For me, falling into K-pop seemingly happened overnight. In 2014, when I was about 13 and living in Sydney, one of my friends showed me EXO’s music video for their song “Growl”. And that’s where my rabbit hole started. Somewhere between getting home from school and 12am, when I found myself tearing through all their music videos and looking up translations of their lyrics, my K-Pop obsession was born. K-Pop became my life. I was stumbling through puberty listening to EXO, BTS, Red Velvet, Girls Generation, and so many more bands. I knew the songs by heart (in awfully butchered Korean), I tried the dances, and I loved the memes. While K-pop was always popular, it wasn’t as loved in the West back then. I liked being a fan of something special, something I thought was underappreciated at the time. I thought that made me special. I tried to see myself in these groups. I began trying to force myself to suit the mold of East Asian beauty standards: light skin, small faces, slim bodies, and big eyes. There is a specific brand of beauty and demeanor that exists in K-Pop: a manufactured, picture-perfect human that is too busy being talented to have flaws. And I didn’t match this brand at all.

Do you know how many times I've been asked how much I weigh at the dinner table? How often people were surprised I was Korean because I didn't have smooth, pale skin and wasn't a size 2?

— Reera 유리라⁷ (@reeraboo) March 30, 2019