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promotes racially ambiguous stars like Jessica Alba and Kim Kardashian as avatars for post-racial beauty. In 2011, an Allure survey found that 85 percent of respondents believed increases in diversity had changed America’s beauty standard; 64 percent considered mixed-race women “the epitome of beauty.” Though mixed-race couples still report rudeness and outright hostility from strangers—there are plenty of places in this country where they would be reasonably wary of walking in public hand in hand—I would wager that almost as many have experienced the bizarre enthusiasm of strangers who marvel, “Your babies will be so beautiful.” You could be the ugliest man and woman in the world, but if you are from distinctly different races, Americans will chase you down the street to describe the color they imagine your babies will be, perhaps invoking the name of a creamy coffee drink or citing a beautiful cousin of a cousin who has slanted eyes that are green. Politically correct people who would never make normative statements about the beauty of one race over another nevertheless feel liberated to adjudicate physical supremacy when the subjects are composed of multiple socially constructed groups. “Asian and white is my favorite,” a blonde soccer mom at my middle school told me once, as though my parents’ decision to marry and have kids was an ingenuity akin to the creation of a Labradoodle. She meant well, of course, even as she fetishized a preteen directly to her face. Today, I would be tempted to respond, “Really? I kind of like Somali-Inuit-Peruvian better,” though it may be worth noting that I’m a lot brattier about the subject when I’m talking to white people. Some elements of beauty appear to be universal. Symmetry and unblemished skin, for instance, are attractive across cultures, likely as a measure of health. Some believe that eye-size preference has biological underpinnings, too; large eyes, particularly in women, are a mark of youthfulness and thus fertility. Still, when Japan sent a delegation of samurai to the United States in 1860 after centuries of isolation, Survival of the Prettiest author Nancy Etcoff reports that the warriors said it was “disheartening” to discover American women had “dogs’ eyes.” Which makes you think that, once you’ve reached the point where beauty ideals are shaped by social power, figuring out the origin of beauty may be beside the point. (Does the fact that hormonal changes at puberty tend to make women paler and men darker, which some use to explain preferences for lighter pigmentation, make discussions of skin color easier or harder?) And while it’s tempting to see new multicultural beauty ideals as democratic in some way, we’re still talking about the often cruel happenstance of being born into a body and a face that will be read as symbols, and the sometimes desperate ways people cope with that. Around the same time that Kwan flew to Hawaii to learn blepharoplasty from Flowers, Dr. Michelle Yagoda flew to Japan’s Otsuka Academy to learn an incisionless eyelid-creasing technique. A blue-eyed blonde whose last name means berry in Russian, Yagoda once dreamed of being a painter, but traded portraiture for plastic surgery. Her practice is across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and includes “integrative beauty” treatments like homeopathy, stress management, and dietary supplements. “If you want it done right, she’s the doctor Ya-goda!” the staff likes to joke. Incisionless blepharoplasty can be performed with local anesthesia and a needle in under an hour. The doctor flips the eyelid inside out (“everts” it) and connects one part of the eyelid to another. The upside is no incision or scarring; the downside is that the procedure tends to be less permanent. When Euny Hong got incisionless blepharoplasty, her then-husband didn’t even notice. She had it done while visiting family in Korea. “When I came back I kept waiting for him to say something. After a couple of days I said, ‘You know what I did?’ He almost didn’t believe me, even after I explained and pointed. He’s Caucasian, but even some of my Asian friends didn’t notice.” In the midst of Julie Chen’s eyelid controversy, Hong, an American-born journalist who appeared frequently on television, wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal arguing that eyelid surgery isn’t about looking white, to mixed response. “I felt that small eyes were just not adapted to TV technology,” she said, characterizing hooded eyes as a televisual distraction on par with wearing eyeglasses. “It’s kind of a race issue and definitely an explosive issue for some, but it doesn’t indicate self-hatred.” Yagoda told me about a black man who had his lips reduced; an Asian family that pressured all female members to get blepharoplasty so their artificial faces would match; and a Latina who had “a nice nose with a small bump and very nice tip,” but insisted on having it “scooped” into a ski-jump shape. Yagoda tried to persuade her to choose a less drastic surgery, but the woman replied that she wanted to look like her family—then displayed photos of a family of highly plastic women. “All had rhinoplasties. Bad ones, I think, overly scooped. But all looking pretty identical.” Yagoda stalled, urging the woman to think carefully about the difficult-to-reverse procedure. After a year, the woman still wanted it. Yagoda performed the surgery, reasoning that it’s
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