Fans of K-Pop star Jang Wonyoung use their idol as inspiration for self-improvement and motivation, but the fandom is increasingly becoming taken over by disordered eating content
“Pill diet, pill diet”... Melanie Martinez’s 2015 sad girl hit, sped up to an annoyingly rapid frequency, blares in 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 beautiful 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 woman in the clips is Jang Wonyoung, K-Pop star and member of South Korean girl group IVE. With a devoted and considerable fanbase (#Wonyoung on TikTok has 1.4 million posts and she has 11 million followers on Instagram), the last few years have seen her popularity only increase, with brands including Miu Miu, French jewellery house FRED and beauty 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 part of it. A movement within Wonyoung’s wider fandom, #Wonyoungism – also 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 in the movement, defines it as being “about motivating other people and also all about aesthetics… some Wonyoungism accounts are about skincare, others are about weight loss, but they always 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 even more worrying extent. Although Wonyoung herself has been careful to warn against extreme diet or lifestyle choices, it’s clear that plenty of the posts within #Wonyoungism fall into the category of eating disorder content. Speculation on Wonyoung’s diet, ‘mealspo’ that might suit a rabbit, and dangerously low weigh-ins are par for the course within #Wonyoungism, where fan-estimated BMI and other stats (which would be severely underweight by NHS standards) are used in aspirational slideshows by young fans seeking to emulate her lifestyle.
Posts within #Wonyoungism are often from users that state their ages as between 11 and 16, and while not all 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 started at 12 and 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 become. Despite the dangers of this kind of content, these posts largely lack any warnings from TikTok about the physical or mental health risks. Another user Dazed spoke to, Tiffany*, said that TikTok had never flagged any of her posts for eating disorder content (despite her account being registered 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 many internet 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 able to ‘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 loss 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🎀
When it comes to regulating content in fandom spaces like #Wonyoungism, the issue lies in the lack of explicit reference to anything disordered. Videos are a mixture of fancams, edits, dance videos and make-up tutorials, with the occasional #WhatIEatInADay thrown in. Where 00s ‘pro-ana’ content most often took the angle of ‘this is damaging and unhealthy, but we don’t care’, TikTok content often frames severely disordered eating as a ‘healthy lifestyle choice’.
TikTok trends selling “being the best version of yourself” through a “healthy lifestyle” are often thinly veiled attempts to equate conforming to beauty standards with discipline and morality. Perfection is achievable, but only 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 diet content at face value. When it comes to users posting examples of “their diets” (including idol-inspired #WIEIADs), she suggests that users should “always 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 believe, for the most part, that their ‘lifestyle changes’ are healthy was evident throughout the interviews for this article. Tiktok user Angelina* pays minimal mind to warnings from people in her life, telling Dazed that “others are always going to think the way you lost weight is ‘unhealthy’ if you don’t include exercising in the process and only focus on controlling your food.” Fellow user Tiffany* uses her results as a benchmark: “considering all the weight that I lost, I honestly feel like my diet must be really healthy.” There is a clear (and largely incorrect) equation of rapid weight loss with improved health, and while interview answers often lauded the ‘healthy’ results of ‘The Wonyoung Effect’, posts from the same users contain references to extreme diets and feelings of mental distress (particularly guilt and shame) around food choices.
“It might be a hot take, but ‘Wonyoungism’ ruined IVE for me. A lot of the TikTok girls just focus on weight loss and EDs – I feel so bad for Wonyoung, she doesn’t deserve this.”
This has not gone unnoticed, as (often older) fans are beginning to resent what one user Dina* called the “toxic Wonyoungism” community. She characterised those perpetuating “toxic Wonyoungism” as going too far in their quest for the perfect lifestyle, to the point where it becomes detrimental to the fandom more widely. Another user Alice* has taken a step back from the community entirely, telling me that “it might be a hot take, but ‘Wonyoungism’ ruined IVE for me. A lot of the TikTok girls just focus on weight loss and EDs – I feel so bad for Wonyoung, she doesn’t deserve this.” Both believed that not engaging with harmful posts in IVE spaces was the way forward, as “hopefully they will just delete their content if it flops.”
For followers of Wonyoungism, it seems that 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 can to avoid it, it’s up to regulatory bodies to ensure TikTok mitigates the damaging content the algorithm pushes to teens just looking to enjoy K-Pop.
*Names have been changed