Fuck Your Fox Eye
Growing up, the mechanical, half-dazed motions of my weekday morning routine were disrupted by the few coveted minutes I would spend on my mother’s bathroom floor. Peering up at her as I sat cross-legged on the cool tiles, I admired how she applied her makeup, how she silently analyzed herself in the mirror in front of her. These meditative moments – wherein I memorized the steps of my mom’s beauty regimen down to the most minute details – would culminate with the announcement of this recurrent mantra: “less is more; makeup should only enhance your natural beauty, not mask it.”
As I’ve aged, I’ve come to revere makeup’s transformative and expressive power. Makeup is a tool for cultivating and harnessing creative potential; it provides the ability to manipulate or elevate, exaggerate or soften. My mom’s beauty philosophy, that “less is more,” was only uttered in an effort to encourage my early self-esteem development. Her insistence that I should apply products with a light hand originates from a desire for me to appreciate my bare face, unobscured by cosmetics. For her, helping me foster not only an acceptance, but also a love for my natural appearance was absolutely imperative; she knew the enmity of the other side and wanted to ensure her daughter wouldn’t.
While I have my qualms with the whole “love yourself” movement and ideology, I am deeply grateful for my mother’s incessant reassurance because I know it stems from her personal struggle with self-love. Compliments of my features were juxtaposed with stories of how she was tormented in school by classmates armed with insults about her “horse teeth,” “duck lips,” and – my personal favorite – “ching-chong” or “slanty” eyes. To this day, she still disdainfully reflects on the peers who would pull their eyes up towards their temples, some even using scotch tape, to demean her. Regularly reminded that she was not beautiful – that she should “go back to where she came from” (so original, I know) – my mom became convinced of her repulsiveness, her perpetual deficiency. Decades later, I not only saw, but experienced the effect this had on her. I was my mother’s daughter, a reflection of her. I understood that her compliments were underpinned by their hate. Despite her attempts to make me love the physical attributes I inherited from her, I ultimately inherited their bigotry.
Every day, the Asian-American struggle to reach aesthetic adequacy according to Western standards endures. And despite my every desire to reject them, I often flounder, succumbing to feelings of defeat and self-loathing. Circulating in the depths of my mind are memories of being told that I’m “pretty for an Asian girl,” and the time I witnessed a man violently declare my mother a “chink” in a crowded grocery store parking lot. These recollections are why the recent “fox eye” beauty trend is so baffling and upsetting to me – for what Asians are condemned, non-Asians are hailed. My mom’s Asian-American identity was reduced to her “undesirable” facial features, with her eyes being the primary target. To see non-Asians all over social media today applying eye makeup and contour, shaving the ends of their eyebrows and redrawing them angled upwards, and even going so far as using cosmetic tape drawn taut from their temples all to create the illusion of “snatched,” or “lifted” eyes is utterly infuriating. After years of wishing my eyes were bigger, rounder, and lighter in hue, it’s almost impossible to articulate my frustration when seeing white influencers and celebrities romanticizing and commodifying the shape of Asian eyes to appear “exotic.” It feels like the ultimate “fuck you.”
Underneath the appropriation introduced and encouraged by this trend lies the oppressive history of Asian pressure to assimilate by altering the shape of their eyes to appear larger. Blepharoplasty – a cosmetic procedure that creates double eyelids – “is one of the most common [surgeries] in East Asian countries, as well as among Asian Americans,” (Lee). This procedure was first performed during the Korean War on Asian women who had married American soldiers. “Because the brides were considered ‘both cultural and racial threats to the US,’ many of them would get the surgery in an effort to assimilate and appear ‘less threatening,’” (Lee). The surgical alteration of their “slanted” Asian eyes allowed these women to be viewed as “good” and “trustworthy.” That it is now deemed attractive to have these “slanted” eyes (so long as you’re not Asian, of course) proves to us Asians that the rules of the game are constantly changing. For Asian women particularly, it’s either fetishization or rejection. Only idealized on the canvas of a white face, our features and cultural identities are stolen. Our relentless strides toward acceptance will always be in vain.
Like most beauty fads, the desirability of the fox eye will eventually subside. However, unlike the white internet beauty gurus who’ve championed this trend, Asian people can’t use makeup to convert their eye shapes based on fluctuating standards. Our eyes are not something that we can casually adopt and then reject when their “allure” phases out. Cultural appropriation is never a valid form of expression, and in the case of this trend, my mom’s words ring true: less is more. Fuck your fox eye.