Different kind of beauty

I remember one time my roommate from China showed me a picture of an Asian model. She asked me if she was beautiful. I told her, yeah, she's beautiful. She told me that she didn't think she was beautiful. She told me that the model didn't match up with the Asian standards of beauty. But what are the Asian standards of beauty?

My knowledge of Asian beauty pertains to South-East Asian beauty. From what I know, a v-shaped face, double eyelids, and pale skin are considered beautiful. Basically Western features. Now I know what you're thinking, what the heck is a v-shaped face and what is a double eyelid? Those terms are not familiar to most Americans because we don't really think about our face shape or our eyelids.

The v-shaped face is essentially a pointed chin. There are a lot of "weird" products that are available in Asian to help achieve that v-shaped face as well as plastic surgery which is a more normal concept over there than it is here.

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Double eyelids are in a nutshell non-Asian eyes. That's a horrible way of explaining it. Essentially, most Asians have what they called monolids or those narrow eyes that don't really have an eyelid. Double eyelid tape or even double eyelid surgery is used to make that extra lid and create the illusion of bigger eyes. 

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More can be said about Asian beauty standards (specifically Korea) here.

Looking at our standards

I find our beauty standards kind of funny. It's not something many think about, but think about the conversations you hear from the people around you. I'm sure you've heard plenty of girls talking about how they need a tan or how they need to shave or how they need to lose weight. It's funny, back then people didn't want to be tan because it showed that they were of lower class. The fad only became popular because Coco Chanel accidentally got a sun tan (read more here). The reason why women shave is because of a marketing ploy to get women to buy razors (read more here). Plump women used to be considered more beautiful and healthy (read more here). Why do we think tanning is beautiful? Why do we cringe whenever we hear of a girl not shaving her pits?

It's because of the society we're raised in.

It's that bubble again, influencing our thoughts on what we think is beautiful. It'd probably be weird to a majority of us to think of others having completely opposite opinions of beauty, but it happens. It's just something to think about.