For the latest episode of Define Beauty, Seoul-based music video director Dee Shin reached out over FaceTime to members of the biggest K-pop groups around to discover how the entertainment industry is rethinking the aesthetics surrounding traditional masculinity. Commanding over 16 million Instagram followers between them, Suho (Exo), Joohoney (Monsta X), Hyunsik Im (BtoB), Taehyun Nam (South Club) and singer-songwriter Jeong Sewoon discuss both the liberalization and commodification of the male beauty industry.

To better understand the career journeys that the icons have taken, the director invited K-pop “trainees” to also feature in this episode. Children as young as 10 sign lengthy entertainment contracts in the hope of becoming the next Suho or Joohoney. Like Olympic athletes, these stars-in-training can spend up to a decade performing, perfecting and pruning themselves before they ever debut a song.

South Korea has become the largest market for the sale of male cosmetics in the world, and the country’s music corporations share no small part in this phenomenon. Smokey eyes, tinted lips, contoured cheeks and a “chok chok” look—what Koreans colloquially call plump, dewy skin—may be a form of genderless self-expression for the young acts, but for the older stars, beauty and style have simply become their stock-in-trade.