Who writes this

Seoul Serene is a small independent desk writing in English about cosmetic surgery in South Korea. We are not a clinic, a hospital, a broker or a medical travel agency. We do not arrange treatment, we do not take a commission on a booking, and we have no clinic partners.

Why this exists

Search in English for almost anything about surgery in Seoul and the first page is advertising: clinic sites, agency landing pages, and listings that charge for placement. The honest answers are scattered across Korean government notices, medical journals, hospital price lists and forum threads, and almost none of it is written for someone reading in English from another country.

So we read those sources and write down what they actually say. When we do not know something, we write that we do not know it.

How this is paid for

Nothing on this site is paid for by a clinic. There are no sponsored posts, no paid listings, no affiliate links to surgery, and no referral fees. If that ever changes, the change will be written on this page and marked on the pages it affects, before it goes live and not after.

Recommending clinics for a fee would also make us a foreign patient broker under Korean law, which requires registration with the Ministry of Health and Welfare. We are not registered, because we do not do it.

What we will not do

• Name a “best” surgeon or clinic. We give you the checks to make instead.
• Reproduce a clinic's before-and-after gallery, or invent patient stories. The only before-and-after here is a licensed figure from a peer-reviewed paper, printed with its consent statement — see before and after.
• Quote a price without saying where the number came from and when we read it.
• Pretend a photograph of a stranger is a patient. See our editorial policy.

Corrections and contact

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and date the fix. Write to [email protected].