Why plastic surgery is so popular in Korea: what the data shows

Cosmetic surgery is common in Korea, and almost every number you have read about how common is either a subgroup quoted as a whole or an extrapolation quoted as a count. The best national measurement available says one in ten Korean adults has had cosmetic surgery, and one in four women in their twenties. It is a striking figure without help from the ones usually printed beside it.

The one-in-three figure is a real number about a narrower group than it is used for

Gallup Korea has asked the same question — have you ever had cosmetic surgery? — of roughly 1,500 adults in face-to-face interviews in 1994, 2004, 2015 and 2020. It is the longest run of comparable figures we could find.

The 2015 round ran from 25 March to 15 April 2015: 1,500 adults aged 19 and over, ±2.5 percentage points at 95% confidence, 31% response rate. The 2020 round ran from 7 to 20 February 2020, two-stage stratified cluster sampling with sex and age quotas, 1,500 adults nationwide excluding Jeju, the same ±2.5 points, and a 25% response rate — 1,500 completions from 6,096 contacts.

The “one in three Korean women” claim is the 2015 figure for women aged 19 to 29: 31%. In that same survey, across all adult women it was 14%, and across all adults 7%. The number is real. The population it describes is one age cell.

Four things about it:

• The cell is small. Gallup publishes ±5.7 points for the whole 19–29 band, which in 2020 was 257 respondents. The women-only cell inside it was 122, and Gallup publishes no margin for that.
• It is self-report, given aloud to an interviewer, about something many people do not volunteer.
• It moved. By 2020 the same cell read 25% while women in their thirties read 31% — broadly the same birth cohort, five years older. Separate samples, not a panel, so that is suggestive rather than demonstrated. It points to an experience people accumulate, not a fashion among the young.
• It measures surgery. Injectables are a different question and produce a different number.

That last point explains most of the spread. A 2018 study in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery surveyed 330 South Korean women aged 20 to 29 through an online panel in November 2017 and found 37.6% reported at least one cosmetic procedure. Of those, 76.6% had had surgery, eyelid surgery in 90.5% of cases, and 83.9% a non-surgical procedure, most often botulinum toxin. Different question, different mode, different number — and not the same thing measured.

The international rankings count surgeons, not Koreans

The per-head claim is usually attributed to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s global survey. It is worth reading how that survey is built.

ISAPS invited roughly 17,000 surgeons from its own database to complete the 2024 questionnaire; 2,975 responded, up from 1,600 the year before. The report states that final figures “have been projected to reflect international statistics and are based exclusively on the estimated number of plastic surgeons actively practicing in each location and the respondent sample”. Where a national society did not supply a surgeon count, ISAPS used “a simple regression model … based on its population size and Gross Domestic Product”. Thirty-two locations were reported individually in 2024 against 23 in 2023, a widening ISAPS says “has influenced some worldwide procedure totals”.

That is a supply-side estimate: surgeons multiplied out, not patients counted.

In the 2024 report South Korea appears fifth for estimated plastic surgeon numbers, with 2,808, behind the United States, Brazil, China and Japan. It does not appear in the top ten by procedures performed — that list runs United States, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, India, Türkiye, France, Chinese Taipei. ISAPS shows specific data only for locations that returned enough responses to be statistically valid.

So the per-capita crown is not in the current edition. Whichever round produced it, it was an extrapolation of the kind above, and anyone quoting it should say so.

Gangnam’s concentration is the part that is easy to verify

Clinic density holds up best, because it is counted rather than surveyed.

The Korea Herald reported in June 2014, on Korean Medical Association figures, that of 1,245 self-employed plastic surgeons at the end of 2013, about 540 had clinics in Gangnam-gu — four in ten of the country’s plastic surgery clinics in one district, with Seocho-gu a distant second. That data is more than a decade old, and we found no equivalent national breakdown published since.

What is recent is the patient side. The Gangnam-gu Office told the Korea Herald in June 2024 that 185,559 foreign nationals received medical services in the district in 2023 — 30.6% of the 605,768 foreign patients recorded nationwide, roughly triple the previous year. Within Gangnam, dermatology accounted for 48.2%, cosmetic surgery 22.7% and internal medicine 10.5%. Japanese patients were 38.5% of the total.

Nationally, the Ministry of Health and Welfare reported in April 2025 that 1,170,467 foreign patients from 202 countries were treated in Korea in 2024, up 93.2% on the year before. Dermatology took 705,000 of them, 56.6% of the total. Plastic surgery took 11.4%.

What clinics are allowed to say shapes what the industry looks like from outside

Korean medical advertising is regulated more tightly than English-language coverage suggests, and the gaps explain a good deal.

Article 56 of the Medical Service Act prohibits, among other things, advertising with content “likely to mislead consumers about the effect of medical treatment, such as a story of one’s experience in treating patients”; advertising that compares one practitioner’s methods with another’s; advertising that “directly exposes medical treatment, such as the scene of operation”; advertising that omits serious side effects; and advertising built on awards, guarantees or recommendations. Article 56(3) bars medical advertising by broadcast altogether. Article 57 requires prior deliberation before an advertisement runs in newspapers, on placards, posters, leaflets or transport, on electronic display boards, or in internet media including mobile applications.

Prior review was once run by bodies entrusted by the Minister of Health and Welfare. In 2015Hun-Ba75, decided on 23 December 2015, the Constitutional Court struck that down as censorship: the reviewing associations were not independent, because the Minister could withdraw the entrustment at any time, the Enforcement Decree fixed the review board’s composition, and the Minister held financial authority over them. The Act was amended in March 2018 to move review to voluntary deliberation agencies.

Article 27(3) forbids introducing, arranging or soliciting patients for profit by waiving or discounting insured fees, or by offering money or transport — with an express exception for “attracting a foreign patient who is neither a policyholder nor dependent” under national health insurance. The anti-touting rule that governs how clinics approach Korean patients does not apply to foreign ones. That carve-out is why the industry a foreign reader meets — referral agents, package deals, testimonials — looks so unlike the one a Korean resident sees.

The research is about discrimination and employment, not about vanity

The academic literature does not support the vanity story that English-language coverage usually tells.

Gallup’s 2020 round asked whether one might have cosmetic surgery for employment or marriage. Sixty-seven per cent said one might; 28% said it was better not to. Among women, 73%; among men, 59%; among adults aged 19 to 39, above 70%. In the 2015 round, agreement that a man might have surgery for employment had risen from 48% in 1994 to 65%, and that a woman might for marriage from 38% to 66%.

That perception has a measurable counterpart. “Lookism hurts”, published in the International Journal for Equity in Health in 2017, used the Korean Education Employment Panel — a nationally representative cohort of 6,000 — to examine 2,973 adults aged 19 to 24. 84.5% reported never experiencing appearance-based discrimination; 2.5% reported it at both waves, 5.8% at follow-up only. Repeated discrimination carried an adjusted odds ratio of 3.70 (95% CI 2.19–6.27) for poor self-rated health; a single report, 3.10 (1.99–4.83). The authors note the measure was a single item and that residual confounding could not be excluded.

What the literature does not show is that surgery fixes anything. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 16 Korean studies covering 6,296 respondents, published in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (44:229–238), found that intention to have cosmetic surgery carried a negative effect size against self-esteem, −0.118. All 16 studies were cross-sectional, which the authors flag: nothing in that design can say which way the arrow points.

What we could not establish

Who turned 31% into “one in three Korean women”. We traced the figure to Gallup’s 2015 round. We could not identify the first publication that generalised it, and we are not going to guess.

An annual count of procedures in Korea. We found no Korean government publication giving the number of cosmetic procedures performed on Korean residents in a year. The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service discloses non-covered prices, not volumes.

Anything about individuals. No source we would cite can establish whether any named performer has had surgery, and Korean law forbids clinics advertising with patient testimonials or endorsements, so the material circulating about named people is not clinical record. The discourse is a real subject — an entertainment industry with visible, standardised aesthetics, and an audience that reads faces as evidence. The individuals are not. Speculation about them is the part of this topic with the worst evidence and the loudest confidence.

Where to go next

• Plastic surgery in Korea: the complete guide, for how the system works.
• What plastic surgery costs in Korea, where the market logic above becomes a number.
• How we source this site.

If a figure on this page is wrong, or you can trace the one-in-three claim further back than we could, we would like to hear it.