Alright we’re putting you on a strict diet of 8 hours of Kpop exposure therapy no exceptions.

But seriously like most have said, the main features that differentiate faces can differ all over the world so it will come with time, just do your best and it will get easier.

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Let me tell you an anecdote. I’m Asian and grew up in an Asian country. When I was studying abroad there’s a time when my American friends were watching a Japanese drama series. I was the one asking them throughout the watch session who’s who because I couldn’t tell the actors’ faces apart.

Each culture has a standard of beauty that celebrities try to emulate as closely as possible. As someone who’s lived in an Asian country for over a decade, it’s actually not that hard for me to identify whether someone is Korean, Chinese, or Japanese based on how they dress and present themselves. Where it gets difficult are celebrity groups within those nationalities. I get actors, actresses, and pop stars mixed up all the time because they all try to do their make-up the same way. This isn’t exclusive to Asia though. Westerners do the same thing and can be just as difficult to tell apart. It’s just we’re far more accustomed to it. That lady from Barbie? I have no idea who she is in or out of costume and could probably take a few incorrect shots. I don’t even know if she’s North American or from some country in Europe or Oceania.

Korean celebrities are the exception. I’m an Asian and can’t tell them apart lol.

Telling people apart is hard. White people all looks alike. Black people all look alike. Several groups of East-Asian people all look alike. It’s why the racists from yore had to write entire hooks on how to classify the different races of people, because it’s really not that obvious.

Recognising races is actually quite difficult, that’s why phones and their facial recognition took decades and still gets things wrong. iPhones use fancy 3D scans if your face to identify you because a picture of your face can easily be accidentally confused for someone who grew up in the same town as you.

Your brain learns to tell people apart based on arbitrary groups, and what makes specific people stand out from their group. If you’ve grown up around white people all your life and you only meet one Asian, that’s quite easy; that’s “the Asian guy”. When you meet a second Asian person, they become “the Asian guy with the round face” and “the Asian guy with the pointy face”. The more people you get to know and interact with, the easier you will learn to tell them apart. Meanwhile, you can tell white people apart by the delicate bone structure in their face and the dimples in their skin because of how similar they are to all the other people you talk to. The tendency for some races to have a small range of eye/hair colors doesn’t make things easy; they’ll have their own characteristics that will be obvious to them, of course.

Celebrities make telling them apart harder by having designed faces, expressions, and mannerisms, all made to look pretty and convey a certain attitude because that’s how they make money. Lots of people find people that look like Chris Hemsworth hot as hell, so the media attracts and promotes people that look like him, and suddenly you’re dealing with a bunch of copycats all making their stylists out-Chris-Hemsworth each other. Women are also often covered in more makeup than men, making distinguishing small features even harder.

Put Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Matt Damon in the same clothes with the same hair style, and it’d be thought to tell which one is which if you’re not an avid fan of one of any of those particular actors. They all have generic, pretty, white faces, because white people just look alike in general. This has actually been a problem for movies in which such actors are cast together, even among white audiences.

Nazis have had to take out tape measures to measure the sizes of people’s noses to show that they were Jewish, because apparently even the people obsessed with their “superior race” couldn’t tell their compatriots apart from the race they built an entire hate ideology for.

Yes you just have to see more Asian people.

When you’ve only seen one in your life, you can differentiate them from everyone else using some broad attributes. You don’t have to pay very close attention to the nuances of their facial structure.

It’s only when you know a lot of people who all have those broad attributes that you have to start noticing other things.

This isn’t racist, it’s just the brain doing what it does best: not work harder than it has to.

It sounds like you’re already doing the work of looking twice, looking closely, paying more attention. Just keep doing that. And remember you don’t have to feel bad about this.

This makes me think of those memes where people struggle with telling white male celebrities apart

Stop beating yourself up. We Asians can’t tell them apart too. Just enjoy the music without guilt.

Tbf, the problem in terms of kpop celebrities isn’t that they’re asians, but how they adhere to pretty strict beauty standards and often use cosmetic surgery for this, so they do, in fact, look pretty similar to one-another. I definitely can’t recognize any K-Pop or J-pop idol’s face, but I’ve never had this problem with any asian I’ve known irl. So maybe don’t think too deeply into it, I don’t think there’s anything wrong or racist about what you describe. Maybe try watching some asian movies with a less “spotless” aesthetic, stuff not necessarily for a young audience or where everyone is supposed to look beautiful, and see if you still have the same problem.

Over a decade ago, I dated someone of a different race from me. I remember being anxious that I wouldn’t recognize her in a crowd the first handful of times that we met in crowded places. I’ve become much better at distinguishing people of different races since, but that’s only because I have a lot of racial exposure where I live.

I don’t know any way of changing this natural occurrence other than repeated exposure. Your brain needs practice. You don’t sound the least bit racist. In fact, you sound the opposite because you’re looking for better mental tooling.

Man, I am white, live in a predominantly white country, and notice even white people looking the same and confusing them for other people. I’m not so sure it’s such a big deal. Humans look pretty close together and is why we constantly bicker about small differences like skin color and eye size; cuz there ain’t much else that’s different. 🙁

It’s an easier task if you’re looking at normal real people, not popstars deliberately selected for ‘ideal’ beauty archetypes, with professional makeup, filters, and editing.

This reminds me of the Korean beauty pageant profile photo discussion 10 years ago.

It’s not necessarily so much a race thing as it is a ‘cultural beauty ideals conformity’ thing. There are a lot of similar looking white celebrities too, the blonde pop princess cloning machine was working overtime in the early 2000’s.

What you are referring to is called implicit bias. It’s the automatic differentiation of tribal heritage. It’s honestly a phenomenon that can’t be controlled. You spend enough time with a certain people, then you are going to prefer that people. IMO that’s why we should drop the cultural walls and just amalgamate

Don’t worry, you’re not racist. If people look similar then they look similar. There is no need to stress out over this very minor issue. Just spend more time with that media and you’ll be able to pick up on differences more easily.

It can be hard to determine the differences between people of different Asian nations sometimes, just like it can be difficult to tell the difference between a Caucasian American, Caucasian European, and a Caucasian Canadian. Some can be easier to distinguish (such as Filipino and Japanese being usually easier to tell the difference than say Laotian and Vietnamese based purely on looks alone), but races now are not as “pure” as they used to be in the distant past. There is a lot of international travel and interracial families, so some may look like another nationality because they are.

Its kinda the same with languages. Spanish and Portuguese sound very similar, and infact are based in the same language family. They both use some of the same words and grammar. But with enough understanding of both you can tell the difference.