What Women Do...For Supratarsal Folds

I have never paid attention to hot trends in the cosmetics industry.  It is unsurprising, then, that the "new" popular beauty product that I've noticed many of my students wearing has, in fact, been on the market for a couple of years.  I'm talking about eyelid tape.



What? Yeah, I had never heard of it either, but I am "blessed," as many Asian women may feel, with a partial supratarsal fold, or, double eyelid.  I say "partial," because many of my friends can attest to having seen me tug at my eyelids in an attempt to realign my eyelid creases - sometimes they naturally move up or down, giving one eye a more "Western" or a more "Asian" appearance.  I don't prefer one look over the other, but I'd like my eyes to be evenly sized at the very least.

Luckily for me, my eyelid creases seem to have settled into place.  But if one morning I should wake up with one eye smaller than the other, there exists a product to solve my problem.  Eyelid tape to the rescue!  In the above picture, it's called an "eyeshadow chip," as if it's just a canvas for color.  But in fact, these handy dandy little adhesive strips actually temporarily change the position of one's crease, allowing mono-lidded women to create temporary double eyelids for themselves.  Seems like a better option than a procedure that is ominously named "Asian Blepharoplasty" - double-eyelid surgery.  The idea of this surgery is rather repugnant to me, personally, but I should be less astounded by its popularity in Asia. (I played a game with myself in Seoul, where I tried to guess if every woman I looked at had or hadn't undergone cosmetic surgery.  The stereotype about Korean women exists for a reason!)

It's been hard to find information about the origins and popularization of eyelid tape, but from what I gather, it became a craze in Korea and Japan, and has since spread to China.  Last year, I never saw a single girl in Dalian wearing these, but over the past few months in Xinjiang, I've noticed many people, ranging from freshmen girls to postgraduate students wearing this product.  Black colored contacts are also popular.  These contacts, in conjunction with eyelid tape, create a striking (and not always successful) look.  I wish I could post a picture of my freshman student, Angelina, who manages to make her eyes look like they take up half of her face (think animé).

In 2009, an Asian-American beauty blogger posted these instructions for using eyelid tape. You can see before and after pictures.  I would think having tape on one's eyelids would be rather uncomfortable, but as all women know, beauty is pain. It's just sad, to me, that for many Asian women, "beauty" means "western."