About the eye surgeries popular among Asians

PLASTIC SURGEONS are claiming that the popularity of eye surgery among Asians is not an attempt to appear more Caucasian.

About 1.43 million people had the medical procedures done in 2014. It's so prevalent that a former Korean president had the operation while he was in office.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), eyelid surgery was one of the top five cosmetic surgical procedures last year. The surgery continues to retain its popularity, not just as a solution for drooping eyelids, but also as a way for patients to tweak a facial feature and achieve the aesthetic look they desire."

Before and after eyelid surgery

According to Los Angeles plastic surgeon Peter Lee, MD, who regularly performs the operation on his patients in the growing Asian/American community in Southern California, the procedure is far from a means of cultural rejection. “

"When we describe ‘Asian double eyelid surgery,’ we are referring to creating a supratarsal fold, or a crease” explains Dr. Lee. “An antiquated term that was once used is ‘occidental eyelid surgery,’ which gives a connotation that we are trying to Westernize Asians. However, it has never been about Westernization; it’s about accentuation and enhancement to bring out the aesthetics of the eyes.”

Hmm. I'm not sure about that last statement. The standard of beauty has been dominated by Europe values for centuries, perpetuated by Europe's aggressive colonization of non-Western civilizations, countries and cultures. As the U.S. became a world power, it became the standard bearer of what is attractive through the power of popular culture.

Asian double eyelid surgery involves removing a fatty upper lid and creating a crease in Asian eyes that are absent of a fold. The procedure, which allows the eyes to appear wider, has been criticized as an attempt to westernize Asian eyes and shed cultural identity.

Others do not view the brief surgery (which lasts about an hour) as a way to appear more Caucasian, but as a permanent solution to getting bigger, brighter eyes.

The surgery, more accurately called a blepharoplasty, is not without consequences. 

According to recent report published in the Asian Journal of Ophthalmology,e Asian eyelid measures 7.49 millimeters, while the Caucasian eyelid measures 10 millimeters.

So when plastic surgeons use Caucasian calculations on Asian eyes, the results can be undesirable. The patients might end up with a perpetual look of surprise.  That look is correctable - with another surgery.

TV host Julie Chen admitted that she had eye surgery to change 

her appeparance.

Although the American surgeons claim that the surgery is not to attain a more western appearance, the history of eye surgery among Asians and Asian/Americans is hard to dispute.

The American surgeon who introduced the surgery to Korea, Dr. Ralph Millard, was a military surgeon stationed in South Korea 1950-53.

In a 1964 edition of the American Journal of Ophthalmology, Millard wrote that "the absence of the puerperal fold produces a passive expression which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the oriental." He wrote that he had the first opportunity to try the operation when "a slant-eyed Korean interpreter, speaking excellent English, came in requesting to be made into a 'round-eye.'"

Business Insider cited a 1993 study of 11 Asian/American women in the San Francisco Bay Area who received plastic surgery, ethnographer Eugenia Kaw found that patients underwent plastic surgery in order to "escape persisting racial prejudice that correlates their stereotyped genetic physical features ('small, slanty' eyes and a 'flat' nose) with negative behavioral characteristics, such as passivity, dullness, and a lack of sociability."

Certainly, 11 women don't make a trend but take a look at some of the big movie stars in the Philippines, India and even in Japan and South Korea. If they are not already of mixed raced (usually white) many of them have had the eye and/or nose surgeries to slightly alter their appearance.

K-Pop stars may be setting new standards of beauty in Korea.

Perhaps, surgeons, aware of the racial aspect of the surgeries, may just be giving their patients a reason to submit to the procedures when they claim they don't want to look "too" Caucasian.

One writer, Atlantic writer Zara Stone, wrote that eyelid surgery is also strongly linked to the global phenomenon of K-Pop (think "Gangnam Style" and Girls Generation).

"K-pop has created a completely new beauty aesthetic that nods to Caucasian features but doesn't replicate them," like the big eyes that are so dominant in pop culture, she says.

The big eyes, small faces, and perky noses that are hallmarks of beauty in Korea aren't natural to most Koreans, said Cultural critic Moonwon Lee in the Korean Herald.

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Buzzfeed: Asian/Americans mimic vanity Fair has nothing on Asian/Americans

Asian/American Buzzfeed video producers mimicked Vanity Fair's Hollywood cover.

YOU KNOW those iconic Vanity Fair covers this time of year? Academy Awards time? The Hollywood covers usually feature a bunch of movie stars in full makeup, hair perfectly coiffed and dressed to the nines. They look fabulous and other worldly.

The covers are folded over so that the beautiful people can be extended over two or three standard magazine pages.

The Vanity Fair covers also set standards of beauty that are impossible to attain for the average Joe and Jane. And if you're of Asian descent, the covers just remind you how Hollywood still doesn't consider Asians or Asian/Americans for leading roles.

Last year, in the second year of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the cover featured the women who are considered at the top of their game in the acting world. In the sensitive times we live in, the magazine editors thought it important to show diversity.  The pull-out cover featured Viola Davis, Lupita Nyong’o and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The inclusion of three black actresses is a welcome nod to diversity and a far better cover than in 2010 when the contentious cover featured all young, white ingenues. It should be noted that the last time Vanity Fair had a black woman on its cover it was 1999.

Perhaps we should thank Vanity Fair for realizing it is 2017 and acknowledging the demographic changes occurring in the country. But it took 18 years for black women to return to the Vanity Fair cover.

And where were the Latinas? And, where, oh, where were the Asians?

Our Buzzfeed friends recently did a John Cho (remember last year when #StarringJohnCho went viral featured the actor in various movie posters of hit movies demonstrating that an Asian could easily have played all those roles). 

Meet the 'glamorous' Buzzfeed employees

The irreverent band of 22 Asian/American video producers at Buzzfeed put aside their  usual street attire of hoodies and skinny jeans and dressed themselves up, got made up, and their hair styled to create their own version of the Vanity Fair photo shoot as a visual commentary of that mainstream magazine's lack understanding what constitutes  real diversity.

They looked absolutely fabulous!

Why does this matter? If beauty is in the mind of the beholder, the minds of readers are being subtly brainwashed when they see an influential magazine cover of mostly white good-looking people (with a token sprinkling of beautiful black people). In defining who is beautiful, Vanity Fair editors need to get out of their limos open up their eyes when they walk through New York City's streets.  In one of the world's most inclusive cities, they will see beauty in all hues and races.

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Isla Vista: Making of a wannabe white guy

Elliot Rodger

IF ELLIOT RODGER hated anybody, it was himself.

I've avoided commenting on the shootings at Isla Vista where Elliott Rodgers went on a rampage because a lot of people with more expertise on the topic wrote tons of material trying answer the question of "Why?"

Why would someone who -- on the outside-looking-in -- had "everything?" Why kill six people, wound a dozen others then kill himself? He came from an upper-income family, drove an expensive BMW, was going to a good university which would normally give him a good foundation for success. If he wanted to, he already had his foot in the door if he wanted to enter the entertainment industry because his father was in the motion picture industry, which allowed the young Rogers to occasionally rub shoulders with the rich and famous.

Immediately after the carnage, pundits wrote about white male entitlement, mysogyny (hatred of women), mental illness, when, truthfully, all of them were part of the reason that led a young man to go on a shooting spree, stab his roommates and run down several others with his car.

To this list, I'd like to add one more: Rodgers was a white-guy wannabe.

Very few writers mentioned that Rodgers was biracial, with an Asian mother and a white father. In his hate-filled screeds found in his computer and a delusional manifesto, he often referred to himself as "Eurasian" and considered himself a cut above those who considered themselves as 100% people of color.

At the same time, he saw himself "less" than his full-blooded white counterparts.

I certainly don't want to give excuses for his inexplicable and despicable behavior, but in a way, it can be argued that he was a victim of our own Euro-centric society where our ideas of beauty, power and reward derive from the standards set by our culture and perpetuated and reinforced by our media.

Only in brief spurts did anybody question the idea of what and who is beautiful -- i.e. most notably the groundbreaking Black is Beautiful movement spurred by the militant 1960s, and more recently by Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o, who used her moment of fame during the Academy Awards to speak about her own doubts of acceptance because she didn't meet the traditional (nee caucasion-based) standards of beauty.

Rodgers especially wanted the attention of blonde women, who -- in his twisted mind -- were the ultimate gauge of his masculinity.

At this point, we need to remind ourselves of the desexualized, unassertive, wimp Asian male stereotype in American pop-culture. Although Rodgers didn't say it outright, he thought his Asian roommates were "ugly" and he had no problem stabbing them to death while they slept, thus acting out his unspoken hatred of himself, or at least that half of himself that he never could accept.

He thought that since he was half-white, he should be deserving of all the trophies of being a white male, which included sex with white women and easy access to money (he spent a fortune on lotto tickets thinking a big bankroll would give him access to acceptance by the white power structure).

Instead, his inability to reach his goals in status, sex and fortune led to his frustration and ultimately to his instability: He was a virgin, he was middle-class but not uber-wealthy and he was half-white. He seemed to ignore his Asian half but he thought he was white enough, which he believed should have given him access to the white-guys' club with all the benefits bestowed on that membership.

Like many angry white males in our society (and he considered himself more white than Asian) Rodgers thought he was entitled to certain  rewards simply by his privileged standing in our society. In his twisted logic, anyone who is not white, but were obtaining those prizes that were rightly supposed to be "given" to him, only compounded his anger and drove him over the edge.

The rewards of being white have been drilled into us from the moment we are born, the books and magazines we read, the movies and TV commercials we watch, the history we are taught and the heroes we worship. It is not a simple thing to change that world-view, consciously or subconsciously, imposed on all of us -- no matter what color we are.

Only by reexamining our values, definitions of beauty and by making a conscious effort to change what we are told to believe will we, as people of color, be able to gain a sense and respect of one's self. Fortunately, that's not a new lesson. It is a well-traveled road many have had to explore in order to maintain a sense of sanity and self-worth.

The amount of melanin in our skin doesn't determine the degree of perfection,  neither do almond-shaped eyes need to be surgically rounded, black hair doesn't need "highlighting;" rounded noses don't need to be pointed and ... stop being so conscious of height.

Rodgers is literally and figuratively, a person who was not comfortable in his own skin. But he is also an example of someone who allowed himself to lose himself in our culture's unrealistic standards of perfection, especially those highly imperfect benchmarks based on race or ethnicity.

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For more insight, link to:
-In his own words, "My Twisted World" http://abclocal.go.com/three/kabc/kabc/My-Twisted-World.pdf
-Elliot Rodger's Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/user/ElliotRodger

EDITOR'S NOTE:  For more commentary, observations, tips and references, follow me on Twitter @dioknoed