Asian Plastic Surgery | Dr. Karen Leong

Not to state the obvious, but I’m Chinese, so I am 100% Asian, and Asian people, we’re special. We are very particular about what we want to look like, and a lot of that is driven by culture, especially the South Korean culture.

I spent some time in Seoul learning about Korean and Asian aesthetic surgery, the cosmetic procedures that Asian people want. A large focus of that, as we all know, is skincare. I’m going to skip that right now, but surgically, what most people are interested in are double eyelids and also rhinoplasty and recontouring or contouring the jawline.

The V shape, which is not natural to most Asian people, is very popular. This can be done by a combination of things, such as shaping the bone, shaving it down or augmenting it either with fat or implants, combined with non-surgical things such as Botox to reduce the shape of the muscle and give you that slimmer, more feminine look.

When it comes to the nose, my nose, don’t really have a bridge. It’s a little round and flat. It’s not that cute, so a lot of Asian women want western noses. They want taller bridges. They want a more defined tip, so that is something that we can definitely look at in terms of implants, again with fat and fascia cartilage. Rhinoplasty, I’ll speak about in a different video, but it’s a pretty complicated topic and it’s something that you and I would have to sit down and talk about.

For the eyes, double eyelids. Asian girls don’t like to have a monolid. That means no crease, so there are surgical procedures from very minimally invasive as in no scar or tiny little scars, to something more like an eyelid lift or a traditional blepharoplasty. Again, this depends on your anatomy and what you’re trying to achieve, so we can talk about that when we sit down.

Talking about eyes again, we all want bigger eyes. It’s the anime look. You want that big, sparkly round eye, and most Asian people have more almond-shaped, what we call Mongolian or Mongoloid eyes. There are procedures that we can do to widen the eyes to make them open up more.

The thing with these, though, they can be very satisfying in the short run, but they don’t tend to last. Our tissues, they regrow on the inside and the outside where we do these procedures. With these, I often caution patients, “You may have to come back down the road to get it touched up.”

Asian people, we’re interesting, like I said. We have a lot of special needs, but I’m very interested in it, too, because that’s my culture, so come in and we can talk about it.