RESCENE's Minami Admits Gyaru Makeup Was Pure Desperation After 2 Years of Being Ignored

RESCENE's Minami told MBC's Radio Star on the 16th that the gyaru makeup look everyone now associates with her wasn't a calculated brand move. It was panic.

Two years after RESCENE debuted without making much of a dent, Minami was looking for anything that might get the group noticed. "I thought, at least if I do this, people will pay attention," she said on the show, describing the logic that pushed her toward the bold, maximalist aesthetic rooted in 1990s and 2000s Japanese youth culture. The gyaru style, a word derived from the English "girl" and popularized in Japan decades before Minami was performing, involves heavy, expressive makeup and a very specific personality to match. For Minami, it was something she had never actually encountered growing up in Japan.

"I had no exposure to gyaru culture while I was living in Japan," she explained. "I started it for the first time here in Korea." That detail surprised her Japanese friends, who had been watching her sudden rise from a distance and reached out with a mix of bafflement and teasing. Host Kim Gura noted that reports of "mockery attacks" from Japan had been circulating, which Minami confirmed with good humor: her friends saw her going full gyaru on a K-pop stage and their response was essentially, are you serious right now?

The exchange got a laugh, but there was real vulnerability underneath it. She had gone to auditions in Japan telling people she wanted to become a K-pop idol, and the gyaru direction wasn't what anyone imagined that would look like.

The mom detail that no one expected

What made the story land especially well for the studio audience was the twist Minami added almost as an afterthought. Her mother, she mentioned, had naturally gravitated toward a style and way of speaking that overlapped with the gyaru aesthetic. So when Minami needed to figure out how to actually pull off the persona convincingly, she called home. "I learned the techniques from my mom," she said, which drew a big laugh and briefly stole the segment.

It's a small detail, but it reframes the whole origin story: what looked like a daring creative gamble was, in part, just Minami doing an impression of her mother.

The 'Yaho' question

The gyaru content alone might not have broken RESCENE through, but paired with the "Geoje Yaho" meme, the two videos fed each other on YouTube and the group's trajectory changed. Minami's "yaho" clip, a short moment where she shouts the casual Japanese greeting (roughly equivalent to "hey" or "yo") in an unexpectedly exuberant way, has now crossed 13 million views. Fans request it constantly, and Minami said she estimates she shouts it about 30 times a day at this point.

That's apparently enough. On the 16th's broadcast, she declared she wanted to shout it one final time on the show and officially "graduate" from the catchphrase. Comedian Yoo Se-yoon immediately pushed back, pointing out that he's still doing his own long-running bit and that Minami shouldn't be in such a hurry to move on. The audience disagreed with neither of them, and the segment ended in laughter either way.

For RESCENE, the bigger story is what the gyaru era actually accomplished. Two years of near-invisibility followed by a viral moment built on desperation and a borrowed aesthetic from a mother's style: it's not the typical K-pop comeback arc, which is probably why it worked.