#francesca ahn

While a lot of people in the entertainment business are scouted or found, already with heaps of talent ready to be exploited, Seola was a different case. When she was nine, she was picked up, sans audition. Spotlight wanted someone they could build up to be incredible, and her parents were between a rock and a hard place– they had lots of kids and not a lot of money, so letting Seola do this not only gave them one less mouth to feed, but potentially brought them a third income in the future. Signing was a skill, after all. And since she started so young, it was definitely one Spotlight could drill into Seola’s tiny skull.

She was incredibly young when she debuted, even for Spotlight’s standards. Seola– now known to the world as Shiloh– was only fourteen years old when she debuted as part of Juliette. The cute, quiet, talented little thing. The Nation’s Little Sister– emphasis on the little. Too young to decide if this was the right move for her, Seola embraced it. She got to be on tv. She got to sing and dance with the other girls. She got to meet celebrities and fans. It was like a dream come true.

But as she matured and grew up in the limelight, that dream became more of a nightmare. She was growing up in the nation’s eye– even though it was natural for her to grow and mature, people still saw her as that little girl. Every move she made was watched with a critical eye. Not to mention she barely got a childhood– she’d gone from training all her life to strict schedules. Her only friends were her (much older) group members. Her education was suffering, her diet was not very healthy. Seola even kind of forgot what her real face looked like– it was always covered in makeup, and unfortunately, plastic surgery was very common in the industry. She’d been subject to a nose job a couple years after she debuted. How she really looked, she couldn’t even tell. Hell, it was making her always break out now too, which only made things worse; that was something tabloids loved to talk about. She didn’t have freedom to go out and party and have fun like other girls. She couldn’t date or experiment in that aspect of her life. She felt empty. Like a puppet, whose strings were held by Spotlight and the Romeos.

So she quit. Seola made the biggest decision she’d ever made in her life, and in 2014, she left Juliette and Spotlight altogether. She was a different person than when she debuted, and this life wasn’t for her anymore. She spent a year travelling, trying to find herself, before returning to Seoul to try and figure out what was next for her.

Since she didn’t have much of an education, finding jobs was hard. Music was the only thing she knew, and while she was scared about returning to the idol world, Higher soothed her fears and took her in. She had a lot more creative control now, getting to pick her sound and her vibe. She could figure out who she was, through her music.