Face Powder, Fecund Beauties, and Blinking Correctly

Heidegger wrote, and I paraphrase, that 'the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture', and this is something that I've been fascinated with for a while. I think this is particularly relevant to the discussion of cosmetic alteration on Asians' eyelids in the attempt to look more western/white/caucasian. One might argue that this is largely due to the role photographic and cinematic technologies have played in fundamentally altering societal conceptions of beauty, rendering the unfolded eyelid inelegant. Hollywood and American advertising are potent forces and, by sheer overstimulation and neural potentiation, serve to posit the 'true' image of beauty in a way that is difficult to overcome. One question is: is this a societal interest in the west culturally, visually or unconsciously? Or what else might it be?

There are some society-wide aesthetic drives that are interested in whiteness, but which don't seem to derive from a fixation on caucasian whiteness and rather whiteness unto itself. When I was in Thailand, I realized after a while that all of the convenience stores sold body-whitening powder, which would be applied to the skin in order to hide the shade of a tan. And some chose to walk around the streets of the city with sun umbrellas, shading their skin in the attempt to keep it light. The fact that there are tendencies toward whiteness in this regard – as a mark of wealth, or not having to work in the sun – is something that I think should be noted as evidence that there exist some tendencies toward non-American or western whiteness, and which perhaps transcend such reasoning.

And in this vein Margaret Mead, in her classic ethnological account of the people of Samoa, describes the Samoan's aesthetic desire for well-fattened fecund beauties, slathered with oil and let to lounge around all day – quite a deviation from the conception of beauty in the cultures we've been considering. I bring this up somewhat crudely to illustrate a point, which is that in the absence of external media technologies which might frame their choices, the Samoans developed a preference that is completely absurd to our sensibilities.