Beauty doesn't have a singular definition, but for years, Amber Liu believed it did. Between growing up in Los Angeles and moving to Seoul at 16 to train with one of South Korea's top entertainment companies, she couldn't help but equate beauty with conventional femininity. Beauty wasn't about self-expression or caring for herself. Instead, Liu's definition focused on fitting a stereotypical image of what a girl should be: long-haired, thin, delicate, and poised.

Preferring to keep her hair short and to wear clothes with an athletic aesthetic, Liu felt alienated by the traditional definition of beauty so many women are raised with. "To be really honest, I hated beauty," she admits while visiting the Allure offices during the New York City stop of her "Gone Rogue" tour. "I hated everything about fashion. I just wasn't 'that' girl, so I was like, This is not my place."

After debuting in 2009 with girl group f(x), a then 17-year-old Liu* quickly became K-pop's beloved tomboy. She stayed true to her personal style, often styling her hair into long, edgy pixies and slipping on menswear-inspired clothing while her fellow members had hair flowing past their shoulders and often styled in mini skirts.

As a self-professed valley girl, the tomboy label didn't resonate with her, though, because that in itself felt like another stereotype to abide by. "People are like, 'Oh my gosh, Amber, you're a lot girlier than I thought,'" she tells me, groaning. "I'm like, 'Well, did you have expectations for me to be really [masculine]?'"

Over the past decade, Liu, now 26, encountered this expectation over and over again. At the same time, Liu repeatedly felt pressure to conform to the image of typical feminine beauty, too, on photo shoots and in commercials. No gray area seemed to be left for her between hyperfemininity and masculinity. "Back then, there were very limited visuals for girls to be," she recalls. "I think now, slowly, it's opening up and people are embracing the different sides of femininity and masculinity. It's a spectrum."