Open Your Eyes…WIDER
China’s upper/middle class are consuming more than just luxury goods
The delicious smell of Beijing roast duck mixed with the spicy scent of mapo tofu fills my nose. After our waitress finishes cleaning away the previous customers’ excess duck bones and multicolored array of various spilt sauces, I take off my glasses to rest my eyes after a long morning in front of a computer screen. I look up and see Lishan and Qiutian are both staring at my eyes with looks of amazement on their faces.
“You have such a nice double eyelid,” Lishan tells me. Honestly, until that moment I thought people just had eyelids; I had never looked at a person and examined their face to see what kind of eyelid they had.
This obsession with double eyelids extends well beyond our lunchtime conversation, and even beyond the borders of mainland China for that matter. A host of Asian nations including greater China, Japan and Korea, to name a few, have a growing population of men and women who are willing to sacrifice their health and exorbitant amounts of money on double eyelid and other forms of cosmetic surgery. For China, rising incomes means a growing demand for cosmetic surgery. Aside from paying for expensive facial creams and spa treatments, more and more of China’s wealthy individuals are turning towards cosmetic surgery to achieve the perfect double eyelid as well as partaking in a variety of other cosmetic procedures.
TIME article (see link)
While the rich can access top plastic surgery centers both domestically and overseas, not everyone can afford such treatment. Others, looking for a deal, may seek out one of the thousands of low-cost unlicensed plastic surgery centers that have been popping up throughout China. As a result over 200,000 lawsuits were filed in the past decade against cosmetic surgery practitioners in China alone (See this article in TIME Asia).
Is it worth it?
I suppose the same question can be asked about cosmetic surgery in all countries. Is it really worth putting one’s body in harms way just for the sake of beauty? 见仁见智, the answer to this question varies depending on who you ask. If you ask Saeko Kimura from the TIME Asia article, the woman who, after years of literally gluing her eyelids to make them appear wider, had a successful eyelid surgery, which led to a new career, then the answer might be yes. If you ask one of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese whose cosmetic surgeries led to disfiguration, you might get a different reply.
To clarify, the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens cannot afford such extravagances as cosmetic surgery. However, given the sheer size of China’s population, there is a growing number of high-net earners who are capable of consuming the world’s most luxurious goods and services. While some choose to spend their money on LV bags, others may choose the new BMW Z-series, and yet there are others who will follow the trends started in upscale Miami and LA surgical centers and spend their new found riches on cosmetic surgery. However, it is not the choices of China’s rich that worry me, I am more concerned about the borderline middle-class white-collar worker who, looking for a bargain, seeks out an unlicensed clinic and ends up severely endangering her health.
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Tom Humes