“Yes! I Had Cosmetic Surgery”: Celebrities\u27 Comsmetic Surgery Confessions in the Media and Their Impact on Korean Female College Students\u27 Perceptions.

This paper analyzes celebrities’ cosmetic surgery confessions in the media and explores the impact of the confessions on non-celebrities. Based on the analysis of talk shows and online news in Korea today, I argue that celebrities’ confessions are the result of the interaction between celebrities and the media, and the confessions serve as an atonement ritual to make a new start for celebrities themselves. The confessions also have the effect of trivializing cosmetic surgery. My analysis of Korean female college students’ self-accounts about the confessions confirms these arguments and shows the students’ strong endorsement of cosmetic surgery as well as their tendency to view cosmetic surgery as a means of upward mobility, given the success of surgical celebrities. The survey questionnaire developed for this study, completed by 217 female college students, reveals that more exposure to such confessions predicts greater normalization and trivialization of cosmetic surgery in the respondents’ everyday lives