Instead of shelling out for plastic surgery, one mother in South Korea decided she could make her daughter beautiful through things like massaging her child's face. With a spoon. This week on popular Korean show Martian Virus, the mother discussed how she thought, even as a baby, that her daughter was ugly, worrying that the infant took after the father. She even suffered from postpartum depression. The mother worried that her daughter was going to have a rotund face. In much of Asia, many do not consider large, round faces attractive. So starting when her daughter was two years old, the mother decided to begin a massage routine to mold the child into the beautiful daughter she so wanted. The mother began her daughter's face, so that it would become "smaller" and the girl's chin would become "pointed". She also started massaging her daughter’s legs so the limbs would grow straight, instead of bowlegged. To improve her daughter's skin, the mother makes a skin pack from chicken feet. The idea is that it has lots of collagen and is a "beauty food" in parts of Asia—which is apparently a myth. And to give her daughter double eyelid folds, the mother "massaged" the child's eyes with a chilled spoon for twenty minutes at a time. The mother's beauty regimen has continued for her daughter, now a teenager, on a daily basis for sixteen years, apparently.　 In Asia, there are beauty treatments for women that supposedly help them achieve the figure they desire through massage therapy, but nobody does that kind of thing on children. And the spoon trick is also surprising people in Asia—it seems incredibly extreme. If the show's name didn't already tip you off, please note that Martian Virus features guests that people in South Korea find incredibly unusual. Heck, the program once featured a guy who married a pillow and a grown baby woman (more odd guests here!), so don't even assume everything on it is even real. This mother is certainly not the norm in South Korea, so likewise, don't assume that, either! Online in South Korea, the "facial reconstruction mother" is causing an array of reactions—from commenters happy to see the mother's devotion to her daughter to commenters flabbergasted by the whole thing. This episode of Martian Virus even spread online to neighboring China and Japan, where there are those who don't realize what kind of show Martian Virus is—and, of course, use this episode to make sweeping statements about South Korea. All this being said, spoons are for eating, not for massaging your kid's face. 화성인 '얼굴개조맘'…"딸 얼굴은 내 손으로 만들었다" [Segye] 母亲用手为女儿“整容” 用勺子做出双眼皮 [中国新闻] 화성인 얼굴개조맘 “성형수술 없이 딸 외모 바꿨다” 주장 [MBN] To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.