You know what genuinely exhausts me?
For years, there has been this bizarre online trend where people take screenshots of Koreans in natural lighting, or even paintings and illustrations of Koreans, use a color picker on random parts of their skin, turn it into color charts, and then start mocking Koreans by saying their skin color is "wrong" or "fake."
Now that some Koreans are doing the exact same thing back, people who are seeing it for the first time are suddenly saying, "Why are Koreans like this? Don't they understand lighting? Don't they know what sunlight is?"
But that's exactly the point.
This is almost identical to what many Koreans have been dealing with for years. Just because you didn't personally see it doesn't mean it never happened.
The people making those comparisons know what lighting is. They know what sunlight is. They know skin looks different in shadows and direct light. Yet for years people were still taking color samples from someone's face, comparing the shaded areas to the lit areas, and using that as "proof" that Koreans were bleaching themselves.
That's why so many Koreans see this as mirroring.
It's not that they suddenly forgot how lighting works. It's that they're repeating the exact same absurd method that was used against them for years to show how ridiculous it looks when it's done to someone else.