Age Before Beauty in Seoul
What the marks of a life well lived reveal
As metaphors play out, I suppose it’s not all that surprising that Seoul, largely considered the beauty capital of the world, got under my skin as much as it did.
In Tessera 37, How Taste Led My Travel Again and Again in Seoul, I wrote about how I fell in sync last November with the city’s generous and joyful rhythm of juxtaposition. Seoul was a beautiful enigma to me. Sprawling but intimate, serious but playful, hard-working but purposefully distracted.
Despite its size, I had managed to feel a sense of interconnectedness there, repeatedly struck by the smallest of unassuming, tenderhearted collisions. I had been persistently knocked off balance by Seoul’s inescapable overwhelm and presentation of choice. And I had found an unexpected reassurance in my own gut and intuition that had come over the many months of traveling leading up to Seoul to faithfully mobilize and inspire me.
To travel untethered in Seoul was like moving as if the rug was being pulled out from underneath me one minute just as fresh pavement was being laid down to cushion my steps the next. Disoriented but aware, I grew increasingly curious of an undercurrent of escapism and longing that cut through Seoul with rampant disregard for what and who laid in its wake.
Here was a city rooted in rich tradition and spirituality, bold creativity and innovation but wrapped in a shroud - a delusion - ravenous for agelessness and perfection. In her worst light, Seoul transforms from global trendsetter to desperate diva. There was so much business she was caught up in - staying young, living bigger and looking even more beautiful.
I have never been anywhere in this world that has Seoul’s depth and allure and its obsession with superficial and youthful pursuit. I’m not judging. I’m not trying to be reductive or disrespectful. I have lived my entire life after all in the U.S. of A. – birthplace of the Big Mac, Disneyland and the Kardashians.
If anything, I am deeply fascinated with why this lifestyle came to be, how it came to flourish and what has taken so long for it to spread to the rest of the world. My inner anthropologist was and is feverishly in search of answers.
Seoul feels like it promises the fountain of youth and a more sophisticated, ambitious way to cope with the Peter Pan syndrome – all while looking fabulous and flawless. It’s not tasteless or Malibu Barbie cliché – it’s just different.
It made me think. And there was plenty of time to do that walking past huge, high-end storefronts full of claw machines with adults behind the controls. There were streets with competing escape rooms, fancy reservation-only restaurants dedicated to dessert and selfie studios. If one was looking for entertainment and indulgence, they could no doubt find it in Seoul in so many different forms.
And all of this is before one gets to K-Pop everything - museums, collaborations with banks, tech and healthcare, plushie stores, billboard takeovers, and so on and so on.
And what of the beauty industry? Boutique shops specializing in snail mucin masks and serums, derma spas trading in salmon sperm injections, peels and lifting treatments. Predictably next door, one could find a store selling suitcases – suitcases – enabling tourists to take even more home. All for the promise of getting rid of fine lines and wrinkles, covering up dark circles, masking blemishes and age spots…
Now I know Seoul didn’t create this culture. Iterations and microcosms of it exist almost everywhere around the world. I even worked in Beauty for almost a year out of business school. So once more, no judgment from me. Just the pressing realization that the older I get, the easier it can be to want to erase instead of embrace the marks of a life well lived.
That’s when Seoul really got under my skin.
It forced me to go below the surface. It asked me to suspend the inevitable effects of time just long enough to confront and then soften the boundaries of my own comfort zone with aging and vanity. This wasn’t an exercise in self-pity or self-loathing but rather one in self-awareness and self-compassion. It also wasn’t a commercially or conveniently acceptable reaction to have just then, right there.
In fact, I felt like at the time I would drown if swept up in the churning undercurrent of Seoul.
What was surprisingly clear to me is that I wasn’t looking for a miracle solution. I was looking for the kind of grace I could only find from within.
I didn’t need another suitcase. I needed to unload the baggage of feeling less - less desirable, less radiant and well less…young.
Seoul had opened up an inner dialogue I could no longer suppress and ignore. I was anxious about aging. I was ashamed of mourning who I no longer saw in the mirror, in looking down at my hands or carrying myself up the stairs on creaky, brittle knees.
In the last year as I’ve put my purpose into action, I’ve thought a lot about age and what that number - 47 for me this April - means and most importantly what it doesn’t.
It means I have perspective, freedom of choice and livable wisdom gleaned only from life’s peculiar blows and bottom-outs. It means I have an emotional laboratory of failed and successful experiments to pattern and predict outcomes from so fear doesn’t make the call for me. And it means I have a reserve, a life force of resilience raging inside of me, ready to draw from as needed.
It means I can finally stop living to prove the haters wrong, to impress all the ones who were never really looking before and to say yes to only that which moves me.
It doesn’t mean I’m out of time to love, to see and to start over. It doesn’t mean I have to pursue interests – the connection of our mind, body and gut, the teachings of Buddhism and Dharma, the practice of self-discovery – exclusively, if at all, from inside a traditional career or education track. It doesn’t mean I can’t break bad habits and form better ones.
Suddenly, a rush of pride in turning 47 washes over me. Through it I see just how much Seoul had sent me home with. It had given me the script I needed to address that touchy topic already making waves inside of me. It did what every place that stays with us a lifetime does. It met me where I was.
But I didn’t just uncover this because the perfect mix of soju, kimchi and Mandu coursed through my veins giving me newfound resolve. I finally “got it” because I decided to have my colors done in Seoul and that didn’t go at all to plan.
As someone who has always been engrossed with all things color her whole life, I was excited to connect the dots between what I love and who I am. But somewhere along the way, my perception of the process, more accurately my perception of myself, got in the way of what I heard and what I saw - for worse and then for better.
I was uncomfortable from the moment I sat down, growing more insecure by the minute. Never mind I had to sit under the most horrific, unforgiving fluorescent light to get an accurate read. Part of the process I was politely assured. She directed my attention to my reflection in the mirror. “Could I see the difference between warm blue and cool blue?” she asked. Hell no. All I could see was every last, little imperfection in the face of the 46-year-old staring back at me. I was having a full-blown crisis of confidence.
I tried. I did. But I also seethed in quiet petulance as the staff told me the colors I had loved my whole life diminished me in this way and that. The black sweater I had on that evening brought out dark circles under my eyes. The pastels I love to wear made me look pale. And the bright red I feel unbeatable in cast unbecoming shadows across my face. And so it went on and on.
In their defense, the color professionals were just that – professional. They were patient and careful in their delivery. I, on the other hand, felt like an aging perfectionist who had shown up wrong her whole life. And that didn’t feel like a good and pretty combination – whatever the shade or season of blue.
When we moved away from the mirror, the consultation continued. But something shifted in the rest of the meeting. Among other things, she told me - not hatefully as I believe she meant these things constructively - that my eyebrows had too much of an arch and that my lips were too narrow and undefined. She said referring to my favorite eyeglass frames, I should look for a lighter, more delicate pair of readers to pull my eyes away from the bridge of my nose.
My mind raced ahead trying to outwit whatever this was I had come to pay for. Were they trying to tear me down just to sell me something? Had they actually torn me down? Was I just being overly sensitive, too defensive?
I knew right there I had a choice to make. I could get swept up in the current or I could rise up and swim against it.
I put on a brave face as they asked me to fill out a review in front of them. I love pink, aqua blue, navy, black and cherry red, I defiantly thought. I wasn’t going to stop wearing the colors that made me happy any more than I was going to shave my eyebrows to fix their overly dramatic arch.
I was already feeling less, and this was my tipping point. This was the event that forced me to decide how I was going to regard the woman looking back at me in the mirror for the rest of my life.
The next day at the Gwangjang market, after feasting on some of the best steak tartare of my life, a healthy portion of kimchi dumplings (Mandu), and a bottle of Soju, I paid for one of the market’s young illustrators to draw me. “Make me younger and prettier,” I asked. When she finished, I saw all I needed to in the black and white sketch she held out in front of me.
I saw color.
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