Douyin With The Sickness
Douyin With The Sickness
~ Behind these Asian eyes ~
Every May I am once again tasked to ponder:
This year I am spending The Month exactly as I do every The Month, which is haha business as usual, but with the entitled smugness of those who use a “birthday month” as grounds to collect heads. It’s like saving your sick days for when you’re not sick. Every year I have to google what those letters mean and also why they are lumped together despite denoting vastly different nations in geography and also culture. And I get it. The idea behind it, I mean. But there is no peace to be found in four letters that will allow me to finally rest (not in a morbid way). I was completely content to simply (๑꒡ᴗ꒡๑) through May like this:
Until! I started noticing more and more of That Eye Makeup all over Tiktok and my IG explore page, which is mostly comprised of Korean/Japanese hair salon posts, fat little round animals, home decor, and annoyingly hot couples content — and now that eye makeup. It’s like a cross between K-pop idol makeup and IRL anime. It is commonly depicted with one eye winked and the other wide open as if that is physically possible to do or just huge eyes looking at you like ◉‿◉. I have never been able to do a wink in a photo that doesn’t make me look like I’m mid-sneeze or having a stroke
.
This is peak evidence of the transformative nature of makeup! This all gives me cute aggression. I want to Look ◉‿◉ Like ◉‿◉ That ◉‿◉.
Also, I should note, this isn’t new, really. I don’t know what it was called before (maybe just “makeup”) but it has a new more easily SEO’d name: Douyin Makeup. Douyin
refers to a broad label for makeup popular on the Douyin app in China (basically it’s a China-exclusive TikTok app made by the same makers). It encompasses huge doll eyes, airbrushed matte poreless skin, and cherry lips.
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The eyes are the main focus (for me), contouring your little puffy under-eye pad of flesh, called aegyo sal, a Korean word for “cute meat.” It’s the chubby bit that plumps out when you smile.
I find it so amusing how cultures put beauty to task towards different perceived values, most of which largely appeal to similar aims (femininity, youth, etc) but via different measures. Makes you think how those values are literally made up and how anyone could ostensibly decide to choose which ones they consider valid for themselves or not. Hmm.
Back to eyeballs.
I consider myself adept at doing makeup. I ought to be at least somewhat, considering that my career has given me access to endless makeup products and artistry professionals for the past decade. But for the Asian life of me, I cannot wrap my face around Douyin eye makeup. It’s the visual trickery of it all that requires lining so far away from my actual eyeball that my brain goes, Well this simply can’t be right, can it? Even trying to find my own aegyo sal — deflated by the time soufflé of gravity + aging — is a practice akin to visual easter egg hunting
.Luckily, I have in my possession enough nude eyeshadow palettes to fill a doomsday bunker ensuring all the surviving sister wives can be serving looks throughout the repopulation of Earth. I found the simplest-looking makeup tute and went to town on everything, excluding the prosthetics (colored contact lenses and false lash tufts because I don’t have any and I’m lazy, respectively).
At first, it feels wrong. Like, no, a harsh line of medium taupe does not belong a full centimeter below your lower lash line. The whole thing feels cartoonish. A lot of makeup that’s meant to look like makeup is a bit cartoonish, I suppose. I’ve realized that in this endeavor I’m just not good at cosplaying as the first A in AAPI. My secondary A experience keeps me drawing in the lines, and otherwise mildly resistant to things like “whitening” products or circle lenses. True (◕‿◕) requires all the bells and whistles (namely the lash tufts) that I neglected to do.
The complexity of it all almost makes me long for the days of the “fox eye” trend, which I anatomically excelled at, to begin with. You can pretty much just wait through any trend you don’t like or isn’t for you. One week it’s fox eyes, then it’s doe eyes, then siren eyes, and now whatever we call Douyin eyes (in my mind, I refer to them as that cartoon blink sound.)
That whole eye-tugging pose made an innocuous style of eye makeup iffy to literally everyone who was born with that natural eye and face shape, prompting a revisit to how something so innocuous as an eye shape became so racially charged anyway — including the dual-sided complexity of blepharoplasty’s popularity amongst Asians
. The stigma for “correcting” a historically demonized and still widely mocked inherent facial feature is the lasting legacy of this eyelid surgery.As much as I love beauty, learning about its history sometimes is like when someone trauma-dumps some really dark shit from their past but says lol after everything, and you’re like uhhhh you good, dude?? I don’t really know of anything else with a more consistent heritage of bummer except maybe for most countries.
One could pessimistically regard Douyin-ism as a blade-less bleph, with an assumption that double eyelids, as they’re called, are the constant north star of ways to be beautiful. But the truth is that this makeup, while sooo cute on a screen looks absolutely Huh? What? Oh, hehe, OK in person. It defies the implicit rule of Beauty™ that demands naturalness or a convincing simulation of an unaltered state. It flies in the face of modesty and goes full anime, which I respect, even if it’s not for me necessarily. Instead, I can just do what I usually do, which is to always be standing in the best lighting at the optimal angle.
Except literally one time, by accident, and now it’s my Twitter and iPhone avatar forever.
Douyin, pronounced like dow (as in dow jones) -ween (as in Hallo-).
As it turns out, if you don’t have much aegyo under your sal, you can emphasize it with eyeliners made specifically for that purpose.
Originally introduced by an American plastic surgeon to Korean war brides to help them assimilate into American culture by appearing less…slanty-eyed, for lack of better.
The stigma of Asians getting blepharoplasty to look more Caucasian is a nesting doll of racism when you consider how double-eyelids are inherent in way more races than just white folks.