Photos point to Park's cosmetic treatments
This photo taken on May 13, 2015, shows a bruise on President Park Geun-hye’s face, raising suspicions she had a filler treatment to remove wrinkles around her lips. / Korea Times file
By Kim Se-jeong
Photos of President Park Geun-hye showed she had a bruise on her face in what appeared to be a side-effect of cosmetic treatment.
This bolsters suspicions that her inaction during the day of the Sewol ferry disaster on April 16, 2014 was due to her receiving the treatment during the first seven hours of the sinking.
According to the Hankook Ilbo, the sister paper of The Korea Times, a photo from May 13, 2014, less than one month after the disaster, showed that the President had a visible dark bruise on the right corner of her mouth and chin when she was holding a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae.
The paper quoted medical experts as saying that the bruise “appeared to be an aftereffect of filler treatment,” raising suspicions that she could have had cosmetic treatment a couple of days before the meeting.
“Filling” is an anti-wrinkle treatment done by injecting absorbable materials under the skin. A bruise appears when a needle breaks blood vessels. Filler injections are a popular cosmetic treatment, but due to the pain involved some patients are given propofol to induce sleep.
While there’s nothing wrong with the President receiving such treatment she may have received it when the whole nation was watching the Sewol disaster unfold.
The bruise near the chin appeared again on her face in December last year, according to the paper.
Other photos showed small skin damage near her lips, which look like needle pricks, in January 2014 and December 2015.
The left photo of President Park Geun-hye taken in 2004 and the right one in 2013 show stark differences in her face, with wrinkles removed. / Korea Times file
The paper checked the President’s schedules and confirmed she had no official activities for about three days before the dates when she appeared with the bruises. Medical experts said the treatment can make the face swell, and usually takes a couple of days for it to get back to normal.
For the report, the Hankook Ilbo reviewed some 40,000 photos of Park taken since 2004 and compared close-ups of her face.
The report came hours before lawmakers grilled a troubled doctor who is suspected of conducting cosmetic surgery on her on the day of the ferry sinking. Kim Young-jae, the person in question, was Park’s scandal-ridden confidant Choi Soon-sil’s doctor.
Looking at the photos of the Hankook Ilbo during the National Assembly investigation, Kim said the bruise looked like the filler’s aftereffect, confirming other experts quoted in the news article.
But he denied he had conducted cosmetic surgery on her on the day of the disaster. Also, Cheong Wa Dae denied the allegation. “Cheong Wa Dae’s medical department has neither the facilities to perform the treatments nor the capability to do so.” But the Hankyoreh confirmed last month that the late President Roh Moo-hyun received a double-eyelid surgery at Cheong Wa Dae in 2005.
Kim said he visited Cheong Wa Dae several times and examined the President for skin problems but did not give her cosmetic treatment.