Planning
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- Plastic surgery in Korea: a guide for patients from abroad What the Korean system actually is, what the law gives you as a patient, what nobody can tell you about the price in advance, and how a trip is usually shaped.
- What plastic surgery costs in Korea, and how to find out There is no reliable average price, and every English-language price list is published by someone selling surgery. Here is where real numbers come from and what a quotation has to contain.
- Is plastic surgery in Korea safe? What the rules actually say Safety is not a property of a country. It is a property of an institution, a surgeon and an operation — and Korean law gives you more to check than most places do.
Procedures
Double eyelid surgery in Korea: methods, cost and recovery
The Korea surgery planning checklist
One page: the licences to check, the questions to ask in a consultation, what to put in writing, and how long to keep the week free afterwards. Free, and we send it once.
The checklist goes out by email. Until the list opens, write to [email protected] and we will send it back by hand.
Photograph by SUN STUDIO CREATIVE / Unsplash
More from the desk
Procedures
Facial contouring surgery in Korea: what V-line means
V-line is a marketing name for cutting the jaw, chin and cheekbones. It is bone surgery under general anaesthesia, with a recognised risk of permanent numbness, and it belongs in a different category from anything done to soft tissue.
Safety
Ghost surgery in Korea, and the CCTV law that followed
대리수술 is where someone other than the surgeon you agreed to does the operating. One death in 2016 produced a law that put cameras in Korean operating rooms — and a set of exemptions that let a hospital decline to switch them on.
Planning
How long to stay in Korea for plastic surgery
The length of the trip is not something you can look up. It is set by the follow-up appointments your surgeon schedules and by when that surgeon says you may fly — which is why the return flight is the last thing you book.
Safety
How to choose a plastic surgery clinic in Korea
Four things you can verify from abroad before you book: what kind of institution it is, whether it is registered to treat foreign patients, whether the named surgeon is a specialist, and what the quotation actually covers.
Procedures
Rhinoplasty in Korea: what it costs and what to ask first
Korean clinics set their own cosmetic prices and rarely publish them in full. What decides both the cost and the risk is what goes inside the nose, and whether this is a first operation or a second.
Culture
Why plastic surgery is so popular in Korea: what the data shows
The figures repeated in English are mostly one subgroup from one survey. Here is what the Korean and international data actually supports, and what it does not.