I’ll take your penis Botox and looksmaxxing hysteria and raise you active duty soldiers lining up to receive rhinoplasties. Don’t believe me? According to a new report from Seoul-based newspaper Hankook Ilbo and translated by The Korea Times, elective cosmetic surgeries are on the rise among the country’s troops—and no, it’s not because they’re releasing a 2027 calendar filled with their hottest recruits. Apparently, when you take South Korea’s advanced aesthetics culture and combine it with a rise in military pay, aggressive clinic marketing, and steep military discounts, you get fresh-faced service members.
But it’s not the soldiers’ pursuit of hotness that is causing a commotion—it’s the recovery time. According to the report, front-line commanders are struggling to deal with the growing demands from their service members that are interfering with their military work. A commander at a front-line army unit in Gangwon Province, for example, received a phone call in March from a soldier’s mother who requested her son be excused from trench maintenance. The reason? His eyelids were not yet fully healed from surgery. Another military leader claimed that a soldier was exempted from “critical” cold-weather training after returning from his leave with a fresh rhinoplasty. “I was flustered because he underwent a nose job without saying a word right before the training,” he told the outlet.
South Korea has long been ahead of the U.S. aesthetics curve, especially when it comes to men receiving treatments. (Women also serve in the South Korean army, but are not mandated to do so and make up a far smaller percentage of personnel.) Back in 2019, Yong Joon Noh, a plastic surgeon at Banobagi that focuses on eyes and noses, told Allure that men make up between 30 and 40 percent of his patients. And the Hankook Ilbo article said soldiers have always made up part of that demographic, they just used to get the surgeries during long leaves at the end of their service before transitioning to civilian life.
These days, plastic surgery and other aesthetic treatments have become more common for all genders all over the world. The most recent report from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found a whopping 42.5% increase in the number of surgical and non surgical procedures done globally from 2020 to 2024, with eyelid surgery and gynecomastia in the lead for men. With all this in mind, it tracks that the number of soldiers getting a little work done in the middle of their term would have also increased. In fact, they seem to be a target demo for at least some practitioners: Hankook Ilbo reported that clinics are running ads that promote military discounts.
There isn’t an official statistic declaring how many soldiers have gotten plastic surgery this year, or what the most common procedure among them is, but the surgeries themselves aren’t exactly the issue anyway. Instead, commanders are seeking guidance on how to handle the staffing shortage side effects of the recovery time these elective surgeries require. Based on the story, it seems that at least some experts are in favor of accommodating what one professor calls “the values of a changing generation.” South Korea may be years ahead of the U.S. in terms of aesthetics, but it’s not hard to imagine military commanders facing similar issues on our side of the world next. If John Cena can be open about his hair transplant, why can’t these servicemen get a little time off for their bleph?
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