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Do women from North and South Korea, which used to be one nation, have any differences in their perception of beauty and makeup practices and culture? A survey project was carried out targeting 167 North Korean defectors in South Korea through face-to-face meetings and printed paper surveys, taking one month starting from June 1 through 30, 2016.

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid postwar industrialization was not sustained beyond the mid-1980s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend growth declined and turned negative as Soviet support ended and the terms of trade with China became less friendly (Robinson in Monthly Review 16: 20–31, 1965).

Regardless of time or place, the human instinct to pursue beauty has continued to change to fit the societal preferences of the day.

The Amore Pacific Research Center was commissioned to research North Korean cosmetics’ present status and conducted a series of chemical compositional analyses on 64 cosmetic products made in North Korea. The cosmetic items were procured for eight months starting from June 2016 to January 2018 with the help of Chinese nationals, the US citizens visiting Pyongyang, and my acquaintances asking for anonymity. They purchased the products themselves from Pyongyang and Sinuiju.

Arguably, most women love all kinds of beauty and long to increase its presence in their world, and that includes the ability to enhance their own physical beauty. That longing is equally true of women in a socialist country. North Korea has been highly interested in fostering the cosmetic industry since its early stage of building the nation. Even when economic rehabilitation was underway in the post-Korean War era, Kim Il-sung emphasized the people’s economic development and gave instructions to the people titled, “All for the Post-Korean War Economic Reconstruction and Development” on August 5, 1953.

Under the traditional socialist system, studies of women’s material consumption have been conducted around the cases of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

For an overview of women`s policy in North Korea, 60 volumes of Women of Joseon (2012.1-2016.12) were subject to analysis. The journal has been the exemplary model that puts across the authority`s policy and explores various types of the heroine to push for a “learn from the heroine campaign.” The heroines in the journal articles can be categorized into five types of ideal womanhood - the hardworking woman, the woman revolutionary, the professional woman, the good wife and wise mother, and the woman supporting the military and volunteering. Those five types are used to examine the policy intentions of the North Korean authorities. The analysis of policy intentions found the collapse of conventional gender-based boundaries of labor areas; the spread of the Stakhanov movement; the propagation of the theory of the great family and paternalism of women; and succession by the third generation and political power of women. Like other socialist states, the North Korea advocates gender equality through policies. However, in reality, it defines its view towards women under its unique propaganda called “Juche Idea”, so that North Korean women are dominated by patriarchal ideology that prioritizes the father (the leader) and are socially restrained to realize themselves within the boundaries of the party and organization. They are also haunted by the male-centered patriarchal view of the family and undertake production activities in the labor force while simultaneously handling housework and childcare. Worse yet, women are faced with hardworking competition, production-quotas, and ideology-learning programs that aim to cover the shortcomings of the social economic system and maximize the use of labor forces causing women to be burdened with a double and even triple whammy.

This article considers the problem of North Korea's collective farms from a micro-institutional perspective. It begins with an analysis of the collective farming system introduced in 1958, the changes in 1966 that allowed for sub-work teams, and the further reform of 1996 that permitted a new work squad system. The normalization of North Korea's agriculture is not just a technological problem; rather, it requires reform of the collective farms and their incentives: the removal of the inefficient elements in the shorter term and the promotion of family farming in the medium to longer term.