Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Ms. and Jezebel.

Benjamin B. alerted us to a New York Times story about a new trend in Japan: yaeba.  Some young Japanese women are now having dentists artificially enlarge their incisors canines so as to achieve a look associated with a small mouth crowded with teeth:

Here’s some dental work to that effect, borrowed from the “after” pictures on a dentist’s website:

Michelle Phan, who blogged about the trend, explained:

It’s not like here, where perfect, straight, picket-fence teeth are considered beautiful. In Japan, in fact, crooked teeth are actually endearing, and it shows that a girl is not perfect. And, in a way, men find that more approachable than someone who is too overly perfect.

Communication Studies professor Dr. Emilie Zaslow had something different to say.  She argued that the trend represented a fixation with youth, the sexualization of girls, and pressure on women to infantilize themselves:

…the naturally occurring yaeba is because of delayed baby teeth, or a mouth that’s too small.

In other words, having a crowded mouth makes you look younger, like a girl instead of a woman.  Now, it’s easy to judge Japan as being weird and sexually-suspect, but we have very practices with exactly the same effect here in the U.S.  Consider the preponderance of bleach blonde hair in America. It’s a natural hair color in some children, very rare in adulthood, and adopted mostly by adult women, not men.  Let’s add baby doll dresses and shaving our pubes to the list.

This is a disturbing transnational phenomenon, then, and what I like about the Yaeba example is that it’s unfamiliar enough to Americans that we can see it for what it is.  And, if we can see it for what it is, we can turn our lens onto our own culture and see the things we do in a whole new light.

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UPDATE: In the comments thread, Lori says:

This “trend” is definitely not “new”. If anything it’s old. I actually have (female Japanese) friends who, when asked, told me that that would be a “dead” trend from 10 years ago. Whether they are right or not, during my years in Japan I have noticed that there are fewer Yaeba and generally what I would consider “ugly” teeth, and more “straight, picket fence” teeth as more Japanese get their teeth corrected with braces.

Lori also found some Google Images pictures of men showing off the same look.

I know a guy, bless his heart, who is unendingly surprised to learn that women do things to themselves to try to be more conventionally attractive.  Most recently he learned that bleach blondes are almost always, well, bleached. He thought it was a common natural hair color for adult women. LOL.

In any case, I thought the photographs below — by Zed Nelson, and sent along by zeynaparsel — were neat. They disembody the tools women use to enhance their beauty, revealing them as undeniably artificial.

Eyelash extensions:

Breast implants:

Hair extension:

Buy the book.

For more from Zed Nelson, see our post on cosmetic surgery and being normal.

In Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, Kathy Davis upended the common sense view that people undergo plastic surgery because they want to be beautiful or handsome.  Instead, she found that most people sought cosmetic correction because they felt ugly or strange.  They didn’t want to be great-looking, or even good-looking, they wanted to be normal, unremarkable, to blend in with the crowd.

I thought of Davis’ book when I scrolled through Zed Nelson‘s photographic commentary on beauty, Love Me, sent in by zeynaparsel.  There’s a lot to see there, but here I’ve pulled out some of the pictures that I think resonate with Davis’ findings.

“I’m competing with men 20 years younger than me”:

“To be honest I never thought that I needed it [labiaplasty]. But I read about the procedure in a magazine.”

Leg Lengthening Operation:

“Men’s Health magazine (USA) hasn‘t had a hairy chest on it’s cover since 1995.”  Post-chest wax:

Buy the book.

At his great blog, Work that Matters, Tom Megginson highlighted a pretty stunning commercial.  In it, a woman in a dilapidated mansion looks disgustedly at a mildly repulsive carpet covering a giant room. She resigns herself to pulling it up, revealing a smooth hardwood floor beneath. And she hauls the mass of fibers to the street, only to return to a room newly covered again.

It’s a metaphor for the Sisyphean task of hair removal, of course. So what’s the solution? Well, it’s not rejecting the obviously unrealistic task of being female and hair-free. No. The solution is laser hair removal.

*I stole this fantastic title from Tom.

Thick Culture blogger Jose Marichal forwarded an infographic documenting recent trends in plastic surgery at GOOD.  It showed that cosmetic surgery was up overall:

But that invasive surgeries are actually down, while “minimally invasive” surgeries are up:

Here are some details as to the changes in the top five procedures in 2009:

And here are the top five procedures by age:

For more interesting images about cosmetic surgery, see our posts on breast reduction for men, Asian eyelid surgery, botox and breast implants as empowerment, and the relationship between porn and genital cosmetic surgeries.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

There was a time when the idea of sticking needles into one’s face was something that was to be avoided at all costs.  Then there was botox.  And it didn’t take long before certain segments of society were flocking to the needlers, begging to be stuck.  Face needling has become so commonplace — so desirable, even — that non-needly products have been disguising themselves as needles, so as to attract consumer dollars.

Of what am I speaking?  A product sent in by Ella Dilkes-Frayne.  Ella saw posters in a mall in Melbourne, Australia for non-injectable beauty products sold in containers that mimicked syringes.   The product, hoping to capitalize on the new acceptance of and desire for botox, is a great example of how socially and personally acceptable bodily intervention is always changing.

Over the past few years, I have known a number of people who have gotten engaged, and I’ve noticed a clear trend: within days of getting engaged, many women go on diets, with the goal of fitting a particular dress size by the time of the wedding. We have posted ads for weight-loss products that reinforce the idea that women need to get their bodies under control by their wedding day. Of course, the diet industry tries to convince women (and men) to diet all the time, but there is particular urgency once a wedding is on the horizon, because of course, a wedding is a performance. Women are socialized to dream of their wedding day, and the point is not just to come together with family and friends to declare your commitment to another person. You are also putting on an event at which the bride is the star, and this event needs to provide beautiful photos of the bride and groom to memorialize their love and prove they had a lovely wedding. Dropping a dress size (or two) is presented as one way to ensure you’ll look stunning on your wedding day, and in the photos of it.

However, Kirsten E. and Laura K. sent in a trailer for a new TV show that takes this idea of the pre-wedding beauty regimen to a whole new level. In Bridalplasty, women compete…to win a full cosmetic-surgery makeover before their Big Day:

Seriously.