The ‘Fox Eye’ Beauty Trend Continues to Spread Online. But Critics Insist It’s Racist
Alicia Lee, CNN, August 11, 2020
“Ching chong eyes!” That’s what elementary school kids used to call Sophie Wang. It was an insidious racist slur casually thrown around as they mocked her Asian ethnicity while pulling on the corner of their eyes. {snip}
{snip} And yet, scrolling through social media posts in recent months has brought those memories flooding back thanks to a new beauty trend: “fox eyes.”
On Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, people from all over the world have been posting videos and photos modeling the look — using makeup and other tactics to emulate the lifted, so-called “almond-shaped” eyes of celebrities such as Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Megan Fox.
Fox-eye makeup tutorials show how to use a combination of eye shadow, eyeliner and fake eyelashes, to get a winged aesthetic. Tips include shaving off the tail end of eyebrows and redrawing them to appear straighter and angled upwards. Others have also suggested pulling hair back into a high ponytail or using tape to further lift the eyes. Accentuating eyes to appear slanted, or elongated in shape, creates a more sultry effect, according to some makeup artists creating the look.
But to Wang and other Asian Americans, the “migraine pose” that sometimes accompanies these images — using one or two hands to pull the eyes up by the temples to exaggerate the result — is far too similar to the action used to demean them in the past.
Emma Chamberlain, an influencer with 9.8 million followers on Instagram, was recently criticized for posting a picture that showed her striking this pose while sticking out her tongue.
{snip}” Chamberlain later deleted the picture and apologized, saying it wasn’t her “intention” to pose in an “insensitive way” and that she was “so sorry to those who were hurt by it.”
But the damage had already been done.
“They mock my eyes then say ching chong call me a dog eater and then call me a ch*nk. Like why would you think I’d be fine with Emma’s post?” one person tweeted. “Obviously if she gets to do slant eyes whilst getting praised but it’s my natural eye shape and I’m getting discriminated (of course) I’m mad.”
“It’s a new trend that brings out old stereotypes and old taunts,” Wang said in a phone interview. “Because it makes people like me feel uncomfortable and (to) some degree annoyed, it’s time to talk about it.”
What people don’t understand, Wang wrote in an op-ed for student-run newspaper Stanford Daily in July, is that the gesture has “racially-charged historical weight,” referring to past satirical depictions of Asians in Western media — caricatures poking fun at facial features to portray them as “barbaric,” “subhuman” and inferior.
“Yet in the 21st century, these Asian features have suddenly transformed into beauty trends for non-Asian people,” she wrote, adding that the trend is an act of cultural appropriation.
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Kelly H. Chong, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas, defines cultural appropriation as the adoption, often unacknowledged or inappropriate, of the ideas, practices, customs and cultural identity markers of one group by members of another group whom have greater privilege or power.
“The cultural influencers from the dominant group legitimize it as a cool, style ‘trend,’ and in the process exoticizes and eroticizes it,” Chong added in an e-mail interview. Even the term “almond eyes,” she says, which is being used to describe the shape of fox eyes, has long been used to describe the shape of Asian eyes.
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TikTok user @LeahMelle, whose video denouncing the fox-eye look went viral, said she couldn’t believe that such a trend could be so popular nowadays.
“This wasn’t some dated movie where you could blame the distorted norms of the time period. This was happening now. And it was still viewed as acceptable,” she wrote in an email.
Like most beauty trends, the craze for fox eyes will eventually subside, and has begun to already since it first came about earlier this year. But that’s exactly the problem, according to Stephanie Hu, founder of Dear Asian Youth, a California-based organization that encourages Asian activism.
In an Instagram post, entitled “The problem with the #FoxEye trend,” the organization wrote, “While it may not have originated from a place of ill-intent, it appropriates our eyes and is ignorant of past racism.”
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