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(UN)SAVING FACE, OR THE DESIGNER FACE AS A NEW CONSUMER COMMODITY
We develop a concept of the face in the consumer behavior discipline and contribute to the theory of lookism defined as bias toward people because of their perceived physical appearance (Tietje & Cresap,, 2005). “What is the face?” –is our fundamental research question. What makes the face become the site of voluntary alteration? How do marketing forces drive the mainstream embrace of surgical correction of facial features as a commercial commodity, similar to shoes? While the latest medical advances have handed some control over appearance to consumers and provided them with a product (plastic surgery) designed to correct one’s genetic make-up, the designer face as a new consumer commodity hasn’t been addressed academically yet. Presumably, the face is the most distinctive human body element that sets a person apart from others, but academic studies that incorporate the phenomenon of treating people in a way biased by their perceived physical attractiveness have largely focused on the entire physique. To fill the academic gap, we specifically study the normative function of advertising as it presents itself in the format of street billboards. Examining this advertising language in the context of an emerging pattern of consumer behavior—designing one’s face through surgery—we theorize how the marketing channel normalizes this novel pattern, fitting it into historical, philosophical, social, and cultural contexts; how it legitimizes plastic surgery as a mainstream consumer commodity; and how it makes the face an object of alteration. Moreover, we perform the study in the specific cultural domain of Asia that places a strong metaphorical value on the face and has historically developed the honor-centered concept of “saving face” as a guiding principle of life (Lee, 1999). Driven by the fundamental question “What is the face?” and its examination in the context of the face-saving culture of South Korea, we developed a working research question to guide our inquiry: what makes a culture rooted in conservative beliefs and respect for the elderly so openly question and surgically correct the “quality” of the body received from one’s parents?
