South Korea's Growing Obsession With Plastic Surgery

America is a country obsessed with plastic surgery. Countless tabloids and gossip sites constantly speculate on what celebrity has had work done and where. Americans dished out an estimated $12 billion on cosmetic enhancements last year alone.

But there is a foreign city where plastic surgery is even more extreme than here in the U.S. Roughly 7.5 million people have traveled to this plastic surgery mecca to get work done, where there is an entire district filled with plastic surgery clinics.

That city is Seoul, South Korea.

There, "Gangnam Style" has become a worldwide phenomenon -- Korean pop star Psy's music video is the most watched video in YouTube history, with more than two billion views.

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A staggering one in five South Korean women has had cosmetic work done, compared to about one in 20 American women, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. Korean women are seemingly trying to emulate the doll-like features of the K-pop girls in the "Gangnam Style" video and bands like Girls Generation.

Christina Lim, 19, is one of those women.

Plastic surgery is "a normal thing," she said. "My friends, they would actually just go on vacation and then they would come back with a new face."

Lim has appeared occasionally as a translator on Korean TV and aspires to make it a career, but feels the pressure to make some serious physical changes first.

"I got lots of hate comments, like, 'Why is she even on TV? Why is she so fat?' and I don't have the looks, I don't have that idol figure, I don't have that face," she said.

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South Korea's Growing Obsession With Plastic Surgery