Through a glass, darkly
When people look at themselves in the mirror, it seems that most would prefer to be looking at something else.
Pointing to a woman in a poster wearing a black headband with her hair slightly curled up on both sides, Zhao Qing, 28, asks her stylist to shape her hair into that very retro look: shorn to less than the width of a penny on the sides, parted far to the side on top. The new hairstyle unveils her exquisite face with emphasis on her superior jaw line and tall nose, all basking in the spotlight.
Only a short while ago the woman in the chair was obsessed with the typical Korean drama woman look and style－small face with the help of heavy hair volume, elk-like eye makeup, and milk-texture delicate pale skin tone. But with a natural light yellowish skin, she can always sense that something does not feel right, and she feels anxious that she will be ridiculed for looking like a bleached orange.
However, much to her relief, she has found a cure. By accident she used a tanning filter to take selfies and found that her skin turned darker, and it was not bad at all. In fact the darker skin tone enhanced her cosmopolitan feel and cubic quality for facial contour.
Wavy hair and a pair of big eyes, favored, it seems, by all Chinese magazine models, make your oval face look slimmer. Even in the era of information overload, the Chinese have had different definitions of beauty, but the main theme revolves around two words: white and thin.
The simple and single aesthetic standard has prompted the term appearance anxiety to frequently top hot searches and short video platforms. A recent survey by China Youth Daily found that among females aged 18 to 35, an average of 45 minutes a day is spent looking in the mirror. For every 100 college students, 40 have undergone plastic surgery to varying degrees. Only 1 percent of the respondents said they were very satisfied with their appearance, 55 percent dissatisfied and 14 percent very dissatisfied.
