Mirror Politics: Power and Beauty in East Asia

Beauty is where politics meets the mirror.

We like to think of beauty as a personal domain, but it's easy to forget that what we do in front of the mirror is profoundly shaped by the world beyond it. What we see in the mirror is not personal, but a political product. The global beauty industry, valued at US$425 billion in 2015 (McCracken, 2018), is not just about cosmetics. It’s about a transnational force intricately entwined with power, identity, and the economy. Unlike many global markets historically dominated by the West, beauty tells us a different story.

To understand beauty today is to understand how global structures of power and politics are reflected, quite literally, on our faces.

The Rise of East Asia’s Beauty Industry 

With an expected 6.7% annual growth and half of all new global beauty sales projected to come from the region by 2027, the industry’s center of gravity is shifting eastward (BDA Partners, 2024). South Korea and Japan remain key actors through their globally established cosmetic brands. Japan’s Shiseido continues to market its products through the prestige of “Made in Japan,” while Korean beauty has become a global phenomenon transcending borders. 

Unlike many global industries historically dominated by the West, beauty has become a domain where Asian countries assert their own narratives. While globalization often homogenizes products to meet a universal consumer need, the beauty industry has opened markets of formerly closed economies by realizing that product marketing can be complicated by the buyer's cultural differences or aspirations (Jones, 2010). 

South Korea understood this early on and turned beauty into a form of soft power.

The Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare announced a medium to long-term development plan for the cosmetics industry that allowed the government to investigate the cosmetics exports of companies, including small and medium-sized companies, and simplify export procedures to increase the actors in their market (Sakai, 2021). Each K-beauty product that crosses borders is more than a commercial good. It is a cultural export, a quiet way to attract investment, and to strengthen national prestige.

A desk full of make-up products. Photo by Erika Fletcher on Unsplash

Beauty as Social Control 

When was the last time you felt like you “had to” look a certain way to be taken seriously?

I keep asking myself that question as I navigate my way back in Japan. Every detail feels like a calculated move. The hairstyle. The makeup. We are told that appearance is a matter of personal choice, but that is a lie. The pressure to present ourselves in a certain way is not natural or harmless. It is inherently imposed and indeed political.

For a long time, beauty has been uncontested by academia since the majority considered it a frivolous topic. However, this changed after the 1960s when feminist scholars started to connect beauty to “gender, race, class, power, and politics” (Ma, 2022). Hence, "beauty" affects the everyday life of people not only in the apparent but also in the innate levels of ourselves.

In East Asia, it is tied to what Foucault called “governmentality”, describing how people align themselves with the state's ideals and transform their values and how they behave (Brassett et al., 2022).

Embodied "governmentality" compels young women in Asia to begin working on themselves from a very young age, conform to specific appearances and behaviors, and spend their money in particular ways. The pressure to conform to certain social expectations causes women to invest heavily in makeup, plastic surgery, and other beauty-related products.

The market feeds on this pressure, turning social acceptance into something you can buy, while ensuring the cycle of demand never ends. 

Beauty as Economic Discipline 

Neoliberalism has turned self-care into an obligation and beauty into economic discipline.

Neoliberalism also frames individuals to comprehend physical self-improvement as an economically desirable pursuit. Dippner (2018) calls this trend "aesthetic diligence" within East Asia, especially in China, where young women commit "a calculative and self-governmental labor of risk-managing one's attachments to beauty and its technologies." These forces make endless spending on beauty seem not only normal but reasonable, even rational.

People often insist that the early mornings in front of the mirror are for ourselves. They call it self-discipline, a confidence boost, a harmless ritual of self-care. But the uncomfortable truth is that what feels personal is often profoundly orchestrated. 

Companies capitalize on our insecurities, perpetuating a cycle of consumption. These standards of self-care set for women pressure women to remain "beautiful" at any time, regardless of their career, age, and background. They keep us buying, keep us conforming, and keep beauty tightly bound to neoliberal ideas of worth and discipline within the international political economy.

The Transformation of Digital Marketing of Beauty

Now in the era of digital media, the link between the beauty industry and social media is impossible to ignore. At the heart of this global transformation lies the beauty “influencers”. Critics argue that beauty influencers have fueled an unattainable “hyperreality” figure of women through unrealistic portrayals of women within social media. Many fear that these influencers can evoke consumerism and visual perfectionism (Brassett et al., 2022).

Yet, we can look at this from the other side of the spectrum. It is undeniable that influencers have a powerful "tool" to provide businesses in East Asia, giving large corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises opportunities to expand globally.

Mirror. Photo by Kadir Avsar via Pexels 

For instance, the Korean brand TIRTIR was a relatively small player in Korea’s crowded cosmetic scene. However, in just a year, it became a sensation in Western markets due to the viral success of its cushion foundation. Traditionally designed for East Asian consumers, cushion foundations had barely made an impact in the Western market.

However, TIRTIR flipped the script by partnering with Western beauty influencers, including women of color, and expanding its shade range to 40 in 2023 (Delgado, 2024).

This wise use of influencers demonstrates a shift in the beauty world’s power dynamics, with an East Asian product breaking into a market long dominated by the West.

The Global Consequence: Homogenized Faces and ‘Asian Globalization’

Hence, as globalization accelerated, East Asian countries began not only importing beauty ideals but also reclaiming and reshaping them. Rather than passively adopting Western standards, these nations have increasingly sought to decolonize their markets. The East Asian beauty boom is not merely a story of Western mimicry, but a cultural assertion and economic strategy. 

As intra-East Asian trade has created a core foundation for the international growth of these beauty industries, the development of the global beauty economy in East Asia is more of a result of "Asian" globalization. South Korea shows how deep this control runs. A culture built on collectivism rewards conformity, and beauty has become one of its harshest tests.  Women are expected to chase every trend, spend whatever it takes, and shape themselves into a narrow ideal that society approves of. Social media only makes it worse, plastering one “perfect” face across millions of screens until individuality is treated like a flaw. 

This homogenization of female bodies and appearances often makes me question whether I, as a woman, am supposed to accept it simply. On the surface, following the majority feels easier. It spares you from judgment, and I understand this type of safety. 

Resistance and Conscious Choice

If beauty is where politics meets the mirror, then it can also be where resistance begins.

However, as an East Asian woman navigating both global and local beauty expectations, I no longer see beauty as neutral. It is structural. It is political.

And yet, that recognition is empowering.

I am not here to deny or blame women for following these norms, nor to claim that blending in is wrong. We all navigate a world that constantly tells us how we should look, and we all are in constant search for what is best. So let us recognize how “beauty” is entangled with political and economic power, encourages responsible consumption, and protects individual dignity.

Buy the product if it speaks to you. But let that joy be yours, not something manufactured for your blind compliance. Let your consumption be conscious.

Bibliography

1. BDA partners (2024). The global investment banking advisor for The beauty sector is growing and glowing in Asia. Available at: https://www.bdapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BDA_The-beauty-sector-is-growing-and-glowing-in-Asia_2024_07.pdf.

2. Brassett, J. Elias, J. Rethel, L. and Richardson, B. (2022). I-PEEL: The International Political Economy of Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57-270. Available at: https://0-www-oxfordpoliticstrovecom.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1093/hepl/9780198854395.001.0001/hepl-9780198854395-chapter-3.

3. Delgado, S. (2024). How TIRTIR’s Viral Red Cushion Foundation Went From 3 to 40 Shades in Less Than a Year. Teen Vogue. Available at: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/tirtir-viral-red-cushion-foundation-shade-expansion-interview.

4. Dippner, A. (2018). How Much Is My Face Worth? Neoliberal Subjectification, the Beauty Economy, and the Internet Celebrity Culture in China. ASIEN: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia, pp.38–6338–63. Available at: https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/asien/article/view/14490.

5. Jones, G. (2010). Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. OUP Oxford. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Beauty_Imagined/rqc6YQnSQzcC?hl=en&gbpg=0.

6. Ma, H. (2022). Negotiating beauty: exploring beauty narratives of Chinese women in different life stages. Journal of Gender Studies, pp.1–18.

7. McCracken, A. B. V. (2018). Chapter 34: The global political economy of beauty. In Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender , Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781783478842.00043

8. Sakai, M. (2021). A comparison of the Japanese and Korean beauty industries ーToward strengthening Japan’s industrial competitiveness in the consumer domain. Mitsui & Co. Global Strategic Studies Institute. https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2021/11/17/2109o_sakai_e.pdf.

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