Virgin or vamp? Mere packaging or content? Global phenomenon or lovesick lass? American pop princess Britney Spears is an enigma. But don't underestimate her.

For all her packaged gloss and that blatant, all-American smarm, Britney Spears is an enigma. In person, her nose is a tad large.

Her hair, immortalised in The Flick exercised in one too many music videos which have spawned schoolgirl imitations, frames a face that is plain from certain angles.

Her brown eyes are smudged by dollops of mascara and she wears her bronzed, fleshy body with a brassy confidence that hides the fact that she is only 1.6m tall.

She is cute, not beautiful and can just about sing.

Put everything together, and you have one big icon of globalisation today, thanks to an overheated pop industry that buoyed her talents in her debut hit, Baby One More Time (1999), and later, Oops!... I Did It Again (2000).

'I'm so excited to be here. It's so bee-yoo-diful,' she coos in Seoul at a press conference at the Central City complex on Monday. The 22-year-old singer is in this freezing city to promote her fourth release, In The Zone.

The album clinched the top spot in the American charts within the first week of its release on Nov 18, selling 609,000 copies.

It has been 18 months since her last effort, Britney, which sold 746,000 copies in its first week, but barely reached the crazy high of 1.3 million with Oops!... I Did It Again.

'I wanted to take a year and a half to do what I wanted,' she says. 'With producers I really wanted to work with.'

A number of the tracks were artistically presided over by Spears herself, but almost every one had a celebrity cameo, from Madonna to techno guru Moby.

Otherwise, 'it's all of yourself on the record', she says. 'So it makes it that much more vulnerable.'

CHAMELONS UNITE: Those who wonder if sweet Britney can live up to naughty Madonna's legacy after that pass-the-baton smooch should note that her fourth release, In The Zone, is No. 1 on the American charts.

DOUBLE SPLIT

BUT vulnerability is a game she knows well.

Spears was drastically shaken by the split last year between her mother, Lynne, a teacher, and father, Jamie, a construction builder.

Then, there was her break-up with Justin Timberlake. The singer of American boyband 'N Sync had risen alongside her to stardom by way of teen entertainment act The Micky Mouse Club.

It was a fairytale match - until Timberlake dumped her last year when she pressured him on marriage and he allegedly caught her in a compromising position with dance choreographer Wade Robson.

Spears refuses to talk about the affair but hints that her troubles have made her grow more mature.

'I used to be a lot more open,' she told Entertainment Weekly recently.

'But I didn't recognise that people were going to judge and ridicule every little thing I said. So now I'm trying to keep more things to myself.'

How exactly these rites of passage have informed upon her professionally, that is a different matter.

Two months ago, she cut short a European promotion tour, making record company Jive 'not happy, not happy at all'.

The media had a field day bitching. She went home to cuddle up with Mum in Louisiana. Her co-manager brother Bryan, 26, claimed she had the flu.

Industry watchers speculated that the nail-biting star was burning out, or nursing a break-up from a supposed rebound fling with dancer Columbus Short.

In Seoul this week, fully recuperated and looking more little girl than woman, she is positively demure, exercising her doe-eyed trick.

'I feel like a princess,' she says of trying on the hanbok, Korea's national dress, for a photo shoot.

Later, she hints that she is more woman than girl: 'I'm getting older, more in touch with myself.'

Take that, um, literally. Spears' latest album, chronicling subjects as taboo as physical self-gratification, is an expression of her sexual side.

This, in turn, rides into heightened gear when she struts the stage later at night, in a showcase at Central City's Millennium Hall.

Here, she is a seasoned ring-mistress, commanding a circus of gyrating dancers and Korean fans who sing her lyrics with the American accent down pat.

The Catholic schoolgirl dressed in wholesome plaid skirts of yore now gives way to a temptress in leather and bum jerks, aggressively touting brazen sexuality.

'When I'm on stage it's my time to perform. It's a character,' she explains at the press conference.

'When I'm off the stage I just wanna shut off - be with my family and my friends, be human, have a snack or something, whatever.'

NEXT GOAL: AN OSCAR

IT IS this human side of the Spears enterprise, however, that remains off limits these days.

Perhaps she has already said too much too soon.

In 1999, she pledged to remain a virgin indefinitely, setting herself up for crucifixion this year when Timberlake spilled the beans on her to the press.

Today, she says all the right things at the right time, balancing PR protocol with controlled, if pleasant and mundane banter.

Bite-sized references to her likes and dislikes are handed out as fun facts: She's a Dolce & Gabbana fan, and she adores massages. As for her reported swearing, drinking and smoking, those are no-go areas. Everything else is dished out in good, practised spiel.

Moby, who helped out on the track, Early Mornin', is 'a producer I'm really in love with. He works really well with women'.

Piracy is bad, because 'kids can go out and download stuff, and, um, it's gonna have an effect on album sales'.

Madonna 'is an amazing lady, and fun to be with'.

And, no, her lip-lock with the pop mistress at September's MTV Awards had 'no lesbian vibe' and was only 'acting'.

The smooch, which Madonna repeated with Spears' rival Christina Aguilera, was likened by the high priestess of pop herself to be 'the passing of the baton'.

Spears herself is overwhelmed by the Material Girl's legacy, or even her own sacrilegious role of living up to it.

'I try not to think about it like that,' she says. 'I love what I do, and I think what I do is just creative work and hopefully I won't get writer's block.'

Beyond the alternation between the giggly interviewee Korean mothers will love and the sex-dripping stage-strutter, this is one ambitious woman.

Spears intimates that success in the recording industry is just one of her many career goals. 'I'd love to do a lot of things. I would love to do a musical, or go into the movies,' she says.

'There are so many directors I haven't worked with. I would love to win an Oscar.'

Those who saw her in Crossroads (2002), the major flop that turned out to be an unintended parody of Spears' pop-princess story, laugh your heart out.

MEDIOCRE BUT BIG

BUT do not underestimate her mediocrity, which is a talent in itself.

For this is precisely why her baffling success has continued to flourish: Girl Next Door makes it unbelievably big. If it could happen to Spears, it could happen to anybody else.

Her rise from nowhere to everywhere is the success story of the universal American Dream. Her achievement in the pop world is proof that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people.

To date, she has sold some 20 million records around the world. Last month, she nabbed her own star on Hollywood's Walk Of Fame.

And even all this is not enough.

'I have not fulfilled all my dreams. I still have a long way to go,' she says, but remains tight-lipped for now.

What more could she ask for - the Nobel Peace Prize?

Tweenie romantics will be quick to suggest a knight in shining armour, but that is perhaps too easy.

For Spears is no damsel in distress, and never as ditzy as her squeaky drawl may have led on.

Exactly one year past her coming-of-age at 21, she knows she can stop playing the game of being not a girl, not yet a woman.

But she will rather continue with the little-lass act, feeding this persona off her siren alter-ego to become that familiar, yet other-worldly mystery.

Last Monday, she celebrated her 22nd birthday.

'I went to Hawaii for two weeks. It was a celebration every day,' she says.

Does she still believe in love?

'Do I still believe in love? Do I still believe in love?', she asks in mock drama, tousling hair and rolling eyes.

'Question of the day. Yeessss, I do believe in love.' p> But no, she won't elaborate.

Instead, she leaves you with a dazzlingly white rectangle of teeth for a smile that could almost be a wince.

Living the life of hidden paradoxes, she is too easy to love and hate.

In Korea on Monday, schoolgirls cut classes to stake out her press meet. On the Internet, she has apparently spawned more hate sites - 2,000 - than Saddam Hussein's 744 and vegetables' 1,120.

Girl or woman? Package or content? Global cultural dominator or lovesick lass?

As the mighty Ms Spears might say, perhaps she is simply, Lucky.

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