Leiden University Student Repository

Velazquez, Samira (2020)

Beauty in the Eye of Advertisement

Master thesis | Asian Studies (60 EC) (MA)

What determines beauty? What determines that a grandmother leans down to her granddaughter, affectionately pats her cheek and tells her that she would be pretty, were she a little bit lighter? Who determines that a young man or woman do not get the job because their face does not exuberate enough youthful cheerfulness? Who determines that at 173cm tall and 58.9kg, Miss Korea 2018, Soo Min Kim was called “too fat and not pretty enough” to represent Korean beauty by the public? The main goal of this thesis is to discover if advertisement of skin whitening products and cosmetic surgery created a homogeneous beauty ideal in South Korea.

South Korea

Beauty ideals

Colorism

Cosmetic surgery

Content analysis

Advertisement

Author

Velazquez, Samira

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Politics, Economics, and Society

Supervisors

Veldkamp, Elmer

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en