I’ve always loved the transformative power of makeup and its ability to make you feel like a completely different person or the baddest chick on the block. I love a dramatic cat-eye and dedicate a large portion of my income to eyeshadow, but I've always wondered if there's more to my desire to alter my appearance than even meets my own eyes.
Toward the end of college, I let my obsession with contouring take over my life. I contoured my jawline and nose to achieve a “slimming” effect, which both my Korean relatives and Asian beauty blogs told me would make me look “good,” with some even suggesting that it was a “good” substitution for expensive surgeries popular among East Asian women who want to emulate features more commonly found on white faces. From having my grandmother suggest plastic surgery as a present for my 13th birthday to having my cousins send me (unsolicited) tips about adding “dimension” to my “flat” face or articles about how to contour “the Korean way,” it seemed like I was being told from all sides to change the way I looked. Even worse? It seemed to all be in the service of an oppressive, imported beauty standard that seemed hellbent on telling me my natural features weren’t good enough.
Soon, contouring became that extra step that made me miss important stuff, the thing I’d constantly have to touch up at my desk, and a sort of mask that I felt like I had to put on every time I left the house to feel “presentable” to the outside world. Why was I miserable and waking up an hour earlier than I had to so that I had time to chisel out the corners of the face...to go to the grocery store? I don’t mind applying and experimenting with makeup, but it soon became obvious to me that perhaps my actual motivations for laboring away at my face for hours were more external than internal.
The flaws with my obsession — in terms of both time, money, and perceived value — became all too obvious once I began dating a guy who told my “moon-shaped” face was the prettiest he had seen. (It makes me feel kind of silly admitting that my big wake-up call was some guy’s off-hand compliment, but it was a moment that almost single-handedly reversed a toxic line of thinking I only subconsciously knew existed.) After all, sometimes in order to really internalize something, you need a little external validation to help you realize that you are beautiful, even if society has (constantly) reinforced otherwise.
There are countless guides and tutorials dedicated to showing women of color how to “sculpt” their noses so they appear smaller and hollow out their cheeks in order to emulate the features of many white Hollywood starlets and Instagram models. And while there’s something to be said about using makeup to enhance your appearance, deliberately changing your facial features in order to conform to a narrow idea of what’s considered beautiful…well, that doesn’t feel beautiful to me. Yet if all you see in pop culture are white faces, that can easily warp your perception of beauty and sow seeds of doubt when you look in the mirror.
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For Asian women in particular, it seems a lot of people want us to buy into the desire to create an “optical illusion of a smaller face” — and to chisel away at the “moon-shaped” features many of us were born with by employing contouring techniques to mimic a higher nose bridge or shadowing jawlines. As one article about contouring for Asian faces put it, “Even though Ed Sheeran proclaimed in his song, ‘I’m in love with the shape of you,’ the truth is that we all want that smaller v-lined face.” Is that the truth, or has that belief been foisted on us for so long that it became the truth? If you are told that everyone wants it, it is easy to buy into the idea that you should want it, too.
The issue runs deeper, too, as Asian women aren’t the only ones who are encouraged to contour their faces to adhere to (arbitrary) white-centric standards of beauty, whether or not they realize what they’re doing. However, as makeup artist Nam Vo tells Teen Vogue, the idea that I should want to contour my face is “a little bit of a brainwash.”
“It’s a very complicated thing,” Nam says. “From the moment you’re born, they first want to know you’re healthy. The second thing is, ‘Does she have double eyelids, a high nose, or is her face fat?’”
In her experience, Asian women in particular are taught to “want to look very 'Western',” Nam laments. “I think Asian women are some of the most beautiful in world, but when that insecurity is embedded within you, it’s hard.”
Tides are turning, however: Recently women like Lana Condor and Sandra Oh — women with faces like mine — have proudly walked the red carpet and posed for pictures (on magazine covers, no less!) without faces full of contour. It’s a reaffirmation, and a reminder that my features don’t need “fixing” or shading. They’re right just the way they are.
Maybe then, the solution is to redefine the connotations of contouring. After all, as Nam points out, even the most “pure” makeup looks she does include some level of shading that you would technically consider “contouring.” However, she also stresses that contouring should be less about minimizing or hiding and more about making certain features pop, as the key is to “find what you can enhance and just work with what your mama gave you.” She’s even turned what she calls her own “dumpling” face into a hashtag; her #DewyDumplings rock highlight that is wet and wearable. It’s her signature #NamVoGlow.
If you contour and highlight to draw attention to the features that make you unique, go for it. And even if all you want to do is play with and alter your appearance, that’s fine. (There’s nothing I love more than an overdramatic highlight.) But what it comes down to for me is the promise I’ve made to myself that I will only enhance what I’ve been given — that I will only actively accentuate my features — and maybe spend hours playing with makeup in ways other than contouring.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Lana Condor Wore Purple Eyeshadow in 2 Completely Different Ways
