If you watch any Korean
dorama (a dorama is a type of soap opera that is very common in the Asian
world) or go through some video clips by some famous Korean bands and singers (to
name a few examples: Girl’s Generation, B1A4, SISTAR, and Hyuna) you’ll find it
impossible to not notice how girls and boys talk and act and how different it
is from our western world. At first sight what you will notice is that most
girls and women are constantly trying to look childlike and cute and you might
even think that they have a mental problem or that they are stuck in their
early teens. A friend of mine once even suggested that Korean girls acted
“cute” to draw the attention of older men who might find it arousing to
fantasize about younger girls. However, by
having a second look at the same video clips and doramas, it should be clear
that being “cute” in Korea, or as they say, aegyo,
is far more than an isolated incident; in fact, it is a cultural practice that
very often takes place in Korea.
Aegyo (Hangeul: 애교) is a Korean adjective that translates into English
as “winsome”, which according to the Cambridge dictionary means: “(adj)
attractive and pleasing, with simple qualities, sometimes like those a child
has”. To put it simply, aegyo is
looking cute in a very childlike fashion. However, in terms of society, there
is much more than meets the eyes and being aegyo
in South Korea takes a whole new dimension.
It is present in music, in their doramas, in people’s everyday life and
it has affected Korean society from the way people make music to the types of
plastic surgeries that are performed.
First and foremost, we have to consider that aegyo is typically South Korean and that
it is usually associated to young females, though some boys are also very fond
of looking aegyo, too. According to the vlog eat your kimchi , women tend to try to look aegyo since they are very young until they are in their
mid-thirties, after that, they no longer
try to sound and look cute unless they are making fun of something. Thus, this practice seems to be related age
and also to gender.
To look aegyo is an activity that involves the whole body as well as the
voice. Girls can close their eyes, pout their mouths, and pinch their cheeks,
twirl their hair in order to look cute. Boys often make finger horns, duck
faces, and finger hearts. To top it off, they can lengthen the duration of the
vowels and slightly raise the pitch of their voices to sound childish and
needy. The aim of doing all of the aforementioned changes is to captivate
people’s attention by looking so cute that people are likely to get a cuteness overload
by just having a glance at you.
As mentioned before, this practice nowadays is widely spread
, not only on TV but also in real life. As matter of fact, people have gotten so
interested in looking younger that there is even a surgery called “aegyo sal surgery” which aims at filling
the lower part of your eyes so that they look bigger, therefore, making you
look younger and more “aegyo-ish”.
This procedure is purely aesthetic and has been criticized for many people do
not understand the difference between aegyo
sals and eye bags. The difference however is that whereas aegyo sal contributes to your looking good and juvenile, eye bags
are saggy and darked, and most often makes you look tired. Not to mention that
the only way one can get aegyo sals
is by surgery while anyone can get eye bags by not sleeping properly.
In a nutshell, “aegyo” is an important aspect of Korean
culture and it needs to be thought of in the light of the fact that Asian
culture is somewhat different from our western culture. People need to stop
looking at other people’s culture having their mother culture’s perspective.
Before judging Korean girls and boys as silly and childish, one needs to
understand that beauty standards differ from country to country as well as from
time to time. What is considered cute in one culture may be seen as stupid or
extremely unattractive in another culture’s perspective. This said, it is important to understand what
“aegyo” is if one wants to attempt to
understand how Koreans see beauty and to construe all the underlying meanings
of what being cute is for the majority of Korean people.
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