I suppose the complexion of my Korean posts will now be slightly different due to the immense amount of time that has passed from when I meant to write them (circa September 2013) until now being the start of February 2015 but most of my observations remain the same, I'll just be reporting them with a twang of nostalgia.

So when I left off on the part 1 of this article I was promising to expand on the strange feeling of deja vu one experiences while walking through the packed subways which run like the labyrinth of an ant colony beneath pretty much the whole of Seoul. In fact it felt sometimes like most of the city spent more time below the surface than above but I digress, back to the deja vu. So as you're wondering between exits past the shop packed halls of the sub way stations you'll see one girl pass you and then a few seconds later she'll pass you again wearing an entirely different outfit and then another and another. By this point you will be worrying about your mental health and the possibility of early onset Alzheimer's but don't fret your mental health is still intact for now. What you have been seeing are what are affectionately referred to by the locals as clones.


This is the result of you few interrelated factors. The overemphasised importance of beauty, the societal pressure to conform and in some cases bad parenting with kids given plastic surgery as graduation presents from school. The result is the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. As can be seen below the gross number is still relatively low and I found it concentrated in certain areas like Gangnam, my hood while in Korea, but the worrying thing is their general acceptance of this form of self mutilation and I don't use that lightly as the surgeries vary from the fairly routine double eye lid surgery, to create a flap of skin on the eyelid to simulate the western eye lid, to the viciously invasive surgery that involves removing pieces of the jaw bone to give the cute cartoonish K-pop style jaw line.