갸루피스

Origin

‘Gyaru peace’ joins the Japanese ‘gyaru’ (from ‘gal’) to ‘peace’, the Japanese name for the V sign. It denotes making a V with the fingers and then turning the hand over so the palm faces upward.

The pose comes out of Japanese gyaru fashion, and was hugely popular in the 2000s on the grounds that it made the face look smaller in photographs and photo-booth prints — an effect of where the hand sits relative to the face. As gyaru fashion itself declined, the pose came to look dated by the late 2010s.

Spread

It was revived in Korea in 2022, after Rei of IVE posted a selfie using the pose. She continued to favour it, earning the nickname ‘Rei peace’, and even walked fans through how to do it on a fan-communication platform.

It did not stay within one group. Members of Aespa, NMIXX and others took it up, and by 2022 it had become one of the standard poses in idol photographs before spreading to ordinary users’ social media.

It also drew argument. The spread of a pose from Japanese fashion across Korean social media prompted complaints that it was too Japanese and counterarguments that it was simply a trend, and the dispute itself became news copy.

Usage

• A photo pose with the hand beside the face
• Signalling a cute, playful mood
• Copied within fandoms in imitation of a particular member

Unlike a plain V sign it requires bending the wrist, so it looks awkward until you have practised — and that difficulty was itself part of what drove the copying.

Sources

• Namuwiki, ‘Gyaru peace’ — the coinage; the inverted-palm action; the 2000s popularity and the face-slimming rationale; the late-2010s decline; the 2022 revival after Rei’s selfie and the ‘Rei peace’ nickname
• Cosmopolitan Korea, ‘Have you heard of the gyaru peace? The pose IVE, Aespa and NMIXX are pushing’ (April 2022) — contemporary coverage of its spread across groups
• Wikitree, ‘Too Japanese … fierce argument over the pose trending on social media’ — the dispute around its spread