Made Up Country

Some great grafitti down an alleyway of the city's main shopping district - looking very cool, but wreaking havoc with my coulrophobia.

Downtown Gwangju is a maze like place where narrow, pedestrianized streets teem with both big name retailers and smaller independant stores.
The majority of the busiest, most central area is made up of clothes and shoe shops, although there are others, most notably cosmetics stores - where pretty, heavily made-up girls vie for trade, shouting through microphones and handing out free samples.

In a country where image is everything, the cosmetics industry is big business in Korea - especially as retailers sometimes charge more than double for the major western brands. Perhaps the most interesting area of the industry though, is the growing popularity of cosmetics and make-up for men.
I wouldn't say it's really common as yet, but it is not unusual to see young Korean males wearing some - or even full - make up, and Korean men were responsible for a staggering one fifth of all global sales of male cosmetics in 2011 - that's a mind-blowing $500 million dollars.
I am yet to see a made-up Korean male who, in my eyes at least, doesn't look borderline ridiculous. Be it out-and-out weirdness (as you might expect, many seem pretty bad at putting the stuff on) or just the subtle wrongness I feel when I see a man with a baby smooth, pristine almost plastic-looking face.
The trend though is growing worldwide (most notably in Asia), and it's not too hard to picture a world where, in the future, applying make-up, just like wearing deodorant or getting your hair styled, will no longer be the exclusive domain of the fairer sex.




'If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?'
- Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

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