With wide eyes, sleek cheekbones and delicately upturned noses, the soap stars look alluringly and somewhat numbingly alike - thanks to their own visits to the scalpel-wielding wizards whose gleaming clinics are clustered in a part of this city called 'Makeover Town'.

'It is like fast food,' said a 25-year-old banker from Singapore who, a few days ago, paid US$13,000 (S$19,000) for narrowed cheeks and widened eyes.

Her black-and-blue face was still puffy and painful as she explained the pan-Asian appeal of plastic surgery, Seoul-style.

'There is no human touch,' she said. 'But the technique is very good, and the price is affordable.'

The technique is so good, the price so affordable and demand so keen that Seoul has become a plastic-surgery boomtown.

Promoted vigorously by the South Korean government, Seoul's clinics attract patients from Shanghai to Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur.

Clinics here are desperately seeking skilled surgeons to keep up with demand from women - and some men - who want a face as seen on TV.

The banker with the puffy face, who asked that her name not be published because she had lied to her parents and boyfriend about her travel plans, arrived here from Singapore on a recent Friday morning and by 2pm was under the knife of Kim Byung Gun.

Kim is a plastic surgeon who does about 20 faces a day and runs South Korea's largest chain of plastic surgery clinics. He has four in Seoul that perform 200 surgical procedures a day, and he has invested in two private hospitals in Shanghai, where he says the Chinese avidly watch Korean soaps and where plastic surgery is fast becoming part of what it means to be a modern woman.

'They want to make their faces just like the Korean stars', and they know that the Korean plastic surgeons are most skilled at building these faces,' said Kim, who added that his business has been growing by about 30 per cent a year since 2000. He has had surgery to erase wrinkles around his eyes and narrow the look of his cheekbones and chin.

To accommodate the demand generated by what he says is a very lucrative business, he is replacing his main five-storey clinic here in the heart of Makeover Town with an 18-storey plastic surgery tower.

Precise numbers on how many nose, cheek, chin and eye jobs are being done in South Korea are difficult to find. But according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the number of plastic surgeons here jumped 45 per cent between 2000 and 2005, from 926 to 1,344. In California, the plastic surgery capital of the United States, there are 1,321 plastic surgeons, according to the state's medical board.

The ministry's figures show that the price of cosmetic operations here is about the same as in Thailand but much cheaper than in Japan and the US. An eyelid operation that costs about US$1,500 in South Korea typically goes for twice as much in the US.

Plastic surgeons, along with dermatologists who use Botox and lasers to fashion noses and eyes that resemble those of Korean stars, say that business has never been better and that they struggle to keep up with demand.

'You have to have demand, and these TV dramas provide demand,' said Lim Ee Seok, a dermatologist who gives women faces that resemble the 'benchmark' photos they bring to his Theme Dermatologic Clinic.

Lim owns four clinics and is looking to hire more expert help.

Medical school officials say high pay is luring more and more young doctors into plastic surgery.

'It is quite amazing how many residents are abandoning specialties like internal medicine and pathology to jump on the plastic surgeon bandwagon,' said Yoo In Kyun, an associate professor of psychiatry at Seoul National University Medical School.

Most of the demand for plastic surgery comes from inside South Korea, a nation of 49 million people that is modernising at a speed that is fracturing traditional values. The divorce rate here ranks second highest in the world after Zimbabwe and ahead of the US, according to a 2007 'prosperity index' compiled by the Legatum Institute for Global Development, a policy research group in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

As social bonds weaken, physical appearance has become more important to personal happiness and professional success, according to Ayami Noritake, who is researching plastic surgery here as part of her doctoral degree in gender studies at Australian National University in Canberra.

'After graduation from university in Seoul, many people go to job interviewers where they are told that perhaps they should lose weight or have cosmetic surgery,' she said.

A survey here this year found that 80 per cent of women older than 18 feel they need cosmetic surgery, and about half said they have had such surgery at least once.

The survey, which was part of a doctoral dissertation and widely covered in Korean newspapers, contacted 810 women in Seoul and its suburbs. A majority of those surveyed agreed that 'external factors, rather than internal factors, are more important in defining a person's beauty'.

LAT-WP