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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Feb 16, 2000 | When most women get ready in the morning, they reach for lipstick, mascara and concealer. For Caroline (not her real name), 29, the makeup routine also includes glue, a brush and a mini-fork. It's not an emergency fondue kit. She's a Chinese-American hellbent on forcing a crease, or a fold, onto her eyelids and these are her tools. First she sweeps the glue above her eyes, then uses the fork to hike up her eyelid, and presses it into place. The skin stays folded for most of the day. She says it makes her eyes look bigger, prettier, and as some might argue, more Caucasian.
Sound unusual? Hardly. In Japan and Taiwan, stores sell tubes of eyelid glue and pre-cut tape that women use to create a fold. Other girls, says Caroline, "hold their eyelids back with toothpicks to 'train' them into place." But for those who balk at sticking toothpicks and forks in their eyes (visions of "A Clockwork Orange") there is a third option -- plastic surgery -- where a permanent crease is stitched into place and excess fat is sucked out of the eye socket.
While the procedure, formerly called blepharoplasty (from the Greek "blepharo" for eyelid, and "plasty" which means to shape) has been around since the '70s, more and more women -- and increasingly, men -- are having it done. According to the American Academy of Facial, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS), 167,000 blepharoplasty procedures were performed in 1998. Asian-Americans represented 7.5 percent of all patients undergoing facial cosmetic surgery in 1998.
Plastic surgeons say it is the most common procedure elected by Asian-Americans (and Asians in the Orient), followed by rhinoplasties and breast augmentation. Although the surgery is casually known as "the Asian eyelid surgery" it is not undergone solely by Asians. It's basically a good old-fashioned "eye lift," which gives the eye a fresher, younger appearance by pulling the skin up and back. The surgery isn't always done for cosmetic reasons. Normal aging can cause eyelids to droop and obscure vision; in some cases a blepharoplasty can be a necessity.
Naturally, the Asian eyelid surgery is a sticky issue and questions posed about it are often met with silence, a blast of anger or both (some critics call it "barfoplasty" because it makes them so sick.)
Carrie Chang, a 29-year-old Stanford graduate, is so horrified by the surgery that it inspired her to launch Monolid magazine in December. "Asians are becoming pro-assimilation and monolid is a buzzword for yellow power and not being ashamed of it. It says 'I don't want the surgery,'" says Chang. Monolid's premiere issue featured a profile of the band "Superchink" and a poem called "Recipe for Round Eyes" by Janice Mirikitani.
And while no one interviewed said they had the surgery to look more Caucasian, discussing it inevitably dissolves into a game of semantics. "People say, 'I want to look prettier, I want to look more awake.' But what does pretty mean? How does it come to mean a Western eye? As a historian, we have to look at how words come to mean what they mean," says Elizabeth Haiken, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and author of "Venus Envy: The History of Plastic Surgery."
The word used by most of the women interviewed for this article was "makeup." They cited a problem with eye makeup as their primary incentive for having the surgery. Others said they simply wanted to look more "awake" or have a larger eye because it's universally prettier.
"I've never had a patient come in and specifically say, 'I want to look Caucasian,'" says Dr. Marc Yune, a Korean-American plastic surgeon and spokesman for the AAFPRS. "In fact, they specifically say, 'I don't want an American eye, I don't want a round eye.'" Dr. James Penoff says the number one factor that drives women to his Honululu office is complaints they can't wear false eyelashes.
