The saying, “Beauty is in the eye the beholder,” is something a lot of little girls are told in America. Having grown up in America, but with strong Asian beliefs and culture, this saying never pertained to me. Beauty wasn’t in the eye of the beholder but in everyone’s elses standards, especially in my mom’s standards.
In the Philippines, beauty was defined like other Asian cultures in the East, i.e. pale flawless skin, big eyes, black straight thick hair, and a skinny physique. In my household, hitting puberty was probably the worst thing for me because I ended up gaining unwanted weight and tons of zits.
In China, pale skin and skinny physique are some of the most desirable features a woman can have. Because of this extreme desire, many Chinese women would go through skin bleaching treatments to ensure that their skin is as pale as rice. This method is a highly controversial of cosmetic practices, sometimes involve dangerous health hazard chemicals and do more damage to your skin pigment.
In Japan society, “hattoshin” is a term used to describe the perfect body. There are many various factors to “hattoshin”. One of the many factors is to have a small head. We’re not talking about stinking your head. It is believed that the size of the face should be 1/8 of the total height. Because of this, some Japanese women will go under the knife for a jaw line reduction surgery. This is when their reduce their high cheek bones to help make the woman have a smaller head and bigger eyes (another desired Japanese trait).
In Korea, creased eyelids are very favorable because they enable a woman to have big eyes. This popular and most common plastic surgery also known as blehparoplasty. With bleplehparolpasty, the doctor will basically reshape the eye by folding the upper skin lid. The amount of surgery would be determined to how much the patient desires the creased.
Though at times Asian women may look dainty and perfect, I believe it is because of the high standards and family/culture pressures of perfection expected from them. For a while when I was younger, my mom would tell me that no one would want to marry me if I was always so big or breaking out. I would work out, run, starve myself until I was so skinny that she couldn’t complain about how I looked. As I am an adult now, I am now able to know how to protect my future daughter from the family and culture pressures that might be forced onto her.
Life and Times of A Working Mom 
Heya! I’m filipina too. I went back to the Philippines recently and was watching some really old filipino movies from the 70s (they’re really funny!). But it was interesting to see what characteristics were prized in female movie stars back then as compared to recent years. The beauty characteristics that they looked for in that period were not so much of pale skin, dainty Asian beauty standards you’re talking about as they were the dark haired, brown eyed Spanish beauty. I think that came from the Spanish colonial influence on filipino culture. I don’t see that so much any more these days though.
It is pretty interesting how trends change. If you look at the 1970s stars now, they all wear make up to lighten up their skin.