South Korea's cosmetic surgery craze creates identikit beauty queens

Is a fad for cosmetic surgery transforming South Korea's beauty queens into the kind of identikit clones previously favoured in North Korea's robotic military parades?

If comments on social news and entertainment website Reddit are any indication, the answer could be "yes". On Wednesday, a Japanese blog published mug shots of 2013's 20 Miss Korea hopefuls, noting their uncanny similarity.

The pictures were reposted under the title: "Korea's plastic surgery mayhem is finally converging on the same face. Here are the miss korea 2013 contestants". The photos, and the issue of South Korean cosmetic surgery, has kicked up a storm across the internet.

According to data compiled by The Economist from the International Society of Cosmetic Plastic Surgeons and the UN, South Koreans undergo more plastic surgery than any other nationality: in 2011, 13 million procedures were performed on a population of just 50 million.

Anyone visiting Seoul's trend-setting Gangnam district - famously sent up by Psy in his world-storming pop video - will be unable to avoid advertisements for the area's aesthetic clinics.

The sector is even earning foreign exchange. With Korean television dramas conquering living rooms across the Asia-Pacific, "cosmetic surgery tourism" is booming. On packaged vacations, Asian tourists converge on Seoul for the kind of nips and tucks sported by their Korean idols.