I’ve always loved Jeon Ji Hyun so it’s nice to see a new generation of K-drama watchers discover her anew after she spent over a decade doing exclusively K-movies. When one plays hard-to-get for the television producers, her grand return has to be as splashy as possible and she couldn’t have picked a more perfect character for her to play than Chun Song Yi in You From Another Star. She was like a female version of Dokko Jin except little bit more endearing and a little bit less smart. She fit the role like a glove almost like it was custom-made for her (which it could have been), and if there was ever a Chun Song Yi-cut of YFAS I would buy that. She’s not the best actress around by a long shot but she’s good enough that her added charisma and insanely beautiful looks naturally validate her A-list status. This week the Korean brand Rouge and Lounge released two new endorsement pictures featuring it’s longtime spokesmodel Jeon Ji Hyun looking cool and classy. She was riding high on the incredible success of YFAS coupled with her Baeksang Daesang win but that was overshadowed last month by a joint controversy involving her and Kim Soo Hyun filming a Chinese mineral water CF that was going to be shown only in China for bottled water sold only in China. The brand bottles it’s water from the natural springs source in the mountains known as Changbai Shan (Perpetually White Mountain) on the Chinese side of the border, while the mountain is known as Baekdusan (White Head Mountain) on the North Korean side. The South Koreans have never acknowledged the North Korean-Chinese treaty and legally divided up the mountain, hence the South Koreans still consider the entire mountain belonging to South Korea and legally called only Baekdusan. So when Jeon Ji Hyun and Kim Soo Hyun filmed the CF for bottled water labeled in Chinese “bottled from Changbai Mountain” some K-netizens went apeshit and called them “traitors” for taking money to so thoughtlessly betray the national consciousness on that subject matter.

I don’t know if the furor has died down but I doubt Jeon Ji Hyun’s star is permanently dimmed by this and it’s good and the Korean brands continue to work with her because she delivers fantastic endorsement results. The two pictures above are the latest from the brand while below are her endorsement pictures in the last two years. I think she such a riveting model that I keep thinking “I want to be her!” more than “I want her purse!” Either way, these pictures make me look, that’s for sure.