No, I’m not talking about myself.\u00c2\u00a0 I had a short business meeting on Friday, where we didn’t talk about beauty, but about selling microscopes in Korea and the upcoming fair.\u00c2\u00a0 Beauty came to mind later on, when I took the metro to Apgujeong to meet up with Hyojin.\u00c2\u00a0 First I couldn’t help but notice how young Korean women seem to pick clothing less for comfort and more for looks and fashion.\u00c2\u00a0 In some cases the results are amazing – amazingly beautiful or amazingly funny.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, over dinner, Hyojin and I got to talking about the ideal that Korean women feel the need to live up to, that of super-slim, petite, cute and put-together youth, and pointed out a few passersby that I would have classified slim but that she believed probably thought themselves fat.\u00c2\u00a0 That reminded me of the obviously similar Japanese ideal that had Janet receive both the epithet of “fat” and of “beautiful.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, Janet is not fat, but she is beautiful, and I trust she knows both.\u00c2\u00a0 But I’ve noticed that although I appreciate her facial features and overall shapeliness, those are things that can be appreciated also in other women.\u00c2\u00a0 What makes her beauty unique in my eyes are the things I know to watch for, the looks, the smiles, the animation, and the delightful passionate liveliness these express.*\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the constant personal interaction that makes her beauty stand out to me, that makes it somehow mine to enjoy, and allows me to acknowledge physical beauty in other women (and also men) without threatening hers or her standing in my eyes.\u00c2\u00a0 More than that: it allows me to acknowledge their presence and personhood instead of spending my summers either staring at sidewalks or getting a stiff neck from all that swiveling.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, they’re there – they’re pretty, or not so; well-dressed,\u00c2\u00a0or just plain lacking in sartorial discernment – but they’re not Janet, and they never will be.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s my real beauty – they can be someone else’s.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
But back to the Korean ideal, which if it indeed mirrors Japan’s that closely must not be far from Audrey Hepburn.\u00c2\u00a0 So I found it funny that I was to spot a poster for her famous musical, which in Korean is pronounced “My pear lady.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Therefore, my pear ladies, take heart.\u00c2\u00a0 Even if you’re neither Audrey Hepburn nor Marilyn Monroe, if your man loves you, he’ll see both in you, and more.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
*not an exhaustive list \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, I’m not talking about myself.\u00c2\u00a0 I had a short business meeting on Friday, where we didn’t talk about beauty, but about selling microscopes in Korea and the upcoming fair.\u00c2\u00a0 Beauty came to mind later on, when I took the metro to Apgujeong to meet up with Hyojin.\u00c2\u00a0 First I couldn’t help but notice how young Korean women seem to pick clothing less for comfort and more for looks and fashion.\u00c2\u00a0 In some cases the results are amazing – amazingly beautiful or amazingly funny.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, over dinner, Hyojin and I got to talking about the ideal that Korean women feel the need to live up to, that of super-slim, petite, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}