With this initial catalyst, the surgery took off in a postwar Korea that desperately aspired to the Western physical ideals of their occupiers. military during the war, sex workers, and brides of American GIs. He operated on Korean interpreters working for the U.S. It wasn’t until college that I read that Asian blepharoplasty was popularized in 1950s Korea by David Ralph Millard, an American military plastic surgeon. I’d been ready since the day I laid eyes on my first K-pop star. The “after” screen opened up a world of possibilities. He flipped through a few blepharoplasty before-and-after pictures on his desktop screen. It was, no doubt, the pricier option of the two. He diagnosed my eyelids with ptosis-weaker, sagging muscles common in those with monolids-and recommended the incision and an added ptosis surgery to tighten the area. I could opt for the non-incision sutures or a much more invasive incision technique.
He explained that there were two different types of double eyelid surgery, called blepharoplasty in medical terms. The doctor was a placid, well-groomed man. She and I traveled there together on an early July morning. Shortly before my freshman year of college, my mother scheduled a consultation with a well-known plastic surgeon. We didn’t even know that an eyelid crease was a thing,” they said.īack then, it didn’t strike me that I was getting cosmetic surgery to construct a physical trait that almost none of my friends could even discern. My friends shook their heads and chuckled. “So this is what the surgery would do,” I said, demonstrating. I opened my eyes extra wide to fold the top layer over, creating a crease that stayed in place for a few seconds before I blinked.
Eyelid tape sephora skin#
I took my forefingers and pinched the loose skin on my eyelid. “See how your eyes have a wrinkle, a crease, above the lash line? And mine don’t?” “What do you mean, you’re creating a fold in the eye?” they asked, puzzled. I explained to my mostly non-Asian friends in high school what the surgery would modify. The author at her high school graduation before the surgery. It was the confirmation I needed I was doubly convinced of the life-changing power of the double eyelid surgery. Hers was a complete surgery success story, her entire face seemingly having changed from the procedure. A Korean American unni returned from Seoul the summer before she left for college her previously hooded eyes tripled in size. The passing remarks from family members, the ethereal beauty of Korean stars, and the sandbox jokes built on one another over the years. We stretched our fingers from the outer corners of the eyelids to our temples. My first encounter with the slant eye was on the elementary school playground. Throughout American history, the Asian eye shape has been ridiculed, appropriated, and exoticized with methods like yellowface practices, barbed caricatures, and racist gestures. “You’d look prettier with double eyelids. “We can pay for the surgery later,” my parents reassured me. It seemed like a cruel twist of fate to me at the time. Satisfied, I smiled at myself in the mirror at my newly defined set of eyes.Ī minority of all Koreans are born with the fold, but most of my family members had naturally endowed double eyelids. The tape folded my skin over to create a crease following the curve of my eye. I cut out thin crescent-moon pieces of clear tape that conformed to my eyelid shape, then pasted them above my lash lines. Their eyes looked like the ones I saw onscreen: round and framed by a crease above the eyelid.Īt summer’s end, back at home in America, I would pinch my eyes while inspecting myself in the bathroom mirror to craft folds of various shapes and sizes. You can get the surgery, too, when you’re older.”Īs I would walk home after my hakwon lessons with my grandfather’s hand in mine, I would glance at the women passing us in the Bangbae-dong streets. “Every single actress you see has gotten some type of surgery done. “That’s because they’ve all had double eyelid surgery,” my aunt explained. “Why don’t my eyes look like that?” I asked my family gathered round the TV. They looked nothing like me, from their narrow jawlines to their enormous anime-like eyes and milky-white skin. I sat enraptured by the stick-thin and pale-complexioned Korean stars onscreen with their tragic melodramatic storylines, bubblegum pop tunes, and scandalous dance moves. During the afternoons, I would sprawl out on a bamboo mat in the sweltering heat as my grandmother tuned in to a Korean drama or K-pop concert playing on the government-sponsored channels. Most summers growing up, my parents shipped me off to my grandparents in Seoul.
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