“Pill eating regimen, pill eating regimen”… Melanie Martinez’s 2015 sad girl hit, sped as much as an annoyingly rapid frequency, blares within the background as pictures of rice cakes and sad bits of cucumber flash across the screen. These toddler meals are interspersed with clips of a ravishing young woman dancing to Korean pop music, looking effortlessly (and worryingly) thin. 

This surprisingly isn’t a ‘skinnycore’ thread from days of Tumblr past, but a recent TikTok post, and the lady within the clips is Jang Wonyoung, K-Pop star and member of South Korean girl group IVE. With a loyal and considerable fanbase (#Wonyoung on TikTok has 1.4 million posts and he or she has 11 million followers on Instagram), the previous couple of years have seen her popularity only increase, with brands including Miu Miu, French jewellery house FRED and wonder brand Innisfree tapping her for collaborations.

Whilst TikTok ‘glow-up’ trends have tended towards a white European beauty standard (think ‘That Girl’, ‘Clean Girl’, or the ‘Pink Pilates Princess’ of 2023), the K-Pop scene has been slowly influencing the self-improvement subculture, and #Wonyoungism is a key a part of it. A movement inside Wonyoung’s wider fandom, #Wonyoungism – also generally known as ‘The Wonyoung Effect’ or ‘Wonyoung Motivation’ – combines the soft, girlish elements of the ‘coquette’ aesthetic with self-improvement rhetoric. Angelina*, a fan and participant within the movement, defines it as being “about motivating other people and likewise all about aesthetics… some Wonyoungism accounts are about skincare, others are about weight reduction, but they at all times use Wonyoung as their motivation.”

Disordered eating content is widespread in the K-Pop community and now the cult of personality surrounding Wonyoung is escalating the trend to an excellent more worrying extent. Although Wonyoung herself has been careful to warn against extreme diet or lifestyle choices, it’s clear that loads of the posts inside #Wonyoungism fall into the category of eating disorder content. Speculation on Wonyoung’s eating regimen, ‘mealspo’ that may suit a rabbit, and dangerously low weigh-ins are par for the course inside #Wonyoungism, where fan-estimated BMI and other stats (which can be severely underweight by NHS standards) are utilized in aspirational slideshows by young fans searching for to emulate her lifestyle.

Posts inside #Wonyoungism are sometimes from users that state their ages as between 11 and 16, and while not all of the content is explicitly disordered eating, elements of body image perfectionism underlie much of it. One young Wonyoung fan Jennie* enthusiastically (and heartbreakingly) told Dazed, “I began at 12 and take a look at me now, almost with clear skin, a dream body, and a healthy lifestyle,” demonstrating just how young the demographic idealising a ‘dream body’ has turn into. Despite the risks of this sort of content, these posts largely lack any warnings from TikTok concerning the physical or mental health risks. One other user Dazed spoke to, Tiffany*, said that TikTok had never flagged any of her posts for eating disorder content (despite her account being registered along with her real age as a minor), nor directed her away from other accounts she has interacted with that include explicit trigger warnings.

K-Pop fandoms are undoubtedly a positive ‘hobby’ space for a lot of web users, featuring fun dance trends, make-up looks, and general appreciation of the music. Despite this, it’s clear that ‘idol lifestyle’ content has a dark side, and young users are easily capable of ‘curiosity click’ their way into something resembling the pro-ana chat rooms of the 2000s. TikTok has come under fire before for promotion of fasting apps and weight reduction supplements to users under 18, and has since implemented rules to redirect eating disorder-related searches and hashtags to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) helpline.

@wonyymotive #WONYOUNG | hope everyone listens to ger advice and takes it to mind 🫶🏼🌷 | video from- @🦢 ♬ original sound – wony🎀

With regards to regulating content in fandom spaces like #Wonyoungism, the difficulty lies in the dearth of explicit reference to anything disordered. Videos are a mix of fancams, edits, dance videos and make-up tutorials, with the occasional #WhatIEatInADay thrown in. Where 00s ‘pro-ana’ content most frequently took the angle of ‘that is damaging and unhealthy, but we don’t care’, TikTok content often frames severely disordered eating as a ‘healthy lifestyle alternative’. 

TikTok trends selling “being the most effective version of yourself” through a “healthy lifestyle” are sometimes thinly veiled attempts to equate conforming to beauty standards with discipline and morality. Perfection is achievable, but just for those willing to work at it. Dr Heather Davis, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Tech who specialises in disordered eating content on social media, warns against taking social media eating regimen content at face value. With regards to users posting examples of “their diets” (including idol-inspired #WIEIADs), she suggests that users should “at all times think critically about what you’re seeing, as social media is a highlight reel where extreme content tends to garner more views”. 

That users truly consider, for essentially the most part, that their ‘lifestyle changes’ are healthy was evident throughout the interviews for this text. Tiktok user Angelina* pays minimal mind to warnings from people in her life, telling Dazed that “others are at all times going to think the way in which you lost weight is ‘unhealthy’ should you don’t include exercising in the method and only concentrate on controlling your food.” Fellow user Tiffany* uses her results as a benchmark: “considering all the load that I lost, I truthfully feel like my eating regimen have to be really healthy.” There’s a transparent (and largely incorrect) equation of rapid weight reduction with improved health, and while interview answers often lauded the ‘healthy’ results of ‘The Wonyoung Effect’, posts from the identical users contain references to extreme diets and feelings of mental distress (particularly guilt and shame) around food decisions.

“It could be a hot take, but ‘Wonyoungism’ ruined IVE for me. Loads of the TikTok girls just concentrate on weight reduction and EDs – I feel so bad for Wonyoung, she doesn’t deserve this.”

This has not gone unnoticed, as (often older) fans are starting to resent what one user Dina* called the “toxic Wonyoungism” community. She characterised those perpetuating “toxic Wonyoungism” as going too far of their quest for the right lifestyle, to the purpose where it becomes detrimental to the fandom more widely. One other user Alice* has taken a step back from the community entirely, telling me that “it could be a hot take, but ‘Wonyoungism’ ruined IVE for me. Loads of the TikTok girls just concentrate on weight reduction and EDs – I feel so bad for Wonyoung, she doesn’t deserve this.” Each believed that not engaging with harmful posts in IVE spaces was the way in which forward, as “hopefully they’ll just delete their content if it flops.” 

For followers of Wonyoungism, evidently Pinterest-lifted images of pastel pink gua shas, perfect idols in tiny skirts, and minuscule bowls of strawberry shortcake oats might work to disguise a more sinister, disordered reality. With fans already becoming sceptical of the direction Wonyoungism content is tending towards and doing what they will to avoid it, it’s as much as regulatory bodies to make sure TikTok mitigates the damaging content the algorithm pushes to teens just trying to enjoy K-Pop.

*Names have been modified