Double Eyelids

Plastic surgery is not a big deal in the Asian culture.  In fact, double eyelid surgery is one of the most common surgeries Asians undergo in an attempt to have bigger eyes.  Ask any white person what it means to have “double eyelids” and you’ll get a blank stare.  Ask any Asian person what it means to have “double eyelids” and they will tell you it is great, it is lucky, it is beauty!

All my life, I heard how unfortunate I was to have fallen into the category of single eyelid Asian.  Not as pretty, not as lucky, not as privileged as those with the big crease in their lid Asians.  I had one girl cousin growing up and she had some fat double eyelids.  I would hear, well she has double eyelids, you have long legs.  You got the consolation prize of long legs but she got the double eyelids.  But hey, you can’t get surgery to make your legs long, you can get surgery to make your eyes big! Yeah, they never said that but I’m sure that’s what they were thinking. 

For as long as I can remember, my aunt was going to “gift” me double eyelids as part of my high school graduation celebration.  This way, my eyes would be double by the time I got to college and nobody would remember from high school and nobody would know from college.  Except anytime I see an Asian girl walk by with fake double eyelids, I can spot ‘em like fake tits at a girls’ neck that have not yet fallen with gravity.  I just know they’re not real.  Most of the time, the crease is made so high above the eye that the cut is just poorly done and only camaflouged with some serious eye make-up.  It’s sort of like boob jobs, nobody goes in to get boob implants that are small A’s or even B’s – go big or go home!  So nobody really goes in to get their eyelid surgery asking for a smaller thinner, less obvious lid.  And the lengths we will go to sport a double eyelid if we do not already have one! 

In 1996, my freshman year of high school, someone mentioned something about tape to create a double eyelid in math class.  I was intrigued, and then I was hooked.  There was no going back.  I had to know more.  I had to get myself some.  This was too good to be true.  My best friend had heard the same thing.  So we both asked around – who said it first?  Who used it first?  Does it actually work?  And what kind of tape was it?  How did you cut it?  How long did it last?  Did it really work?!

A bunch of older sophomore girls had experience with the so called tape.  They let us in on the secret.  It was so simple.  Why hadn’t we thought of it first?! 

Scotch. Freaking. Tape.  It was uncomfortable.  It was itchy.  It was probably not sanitary.  It was a temporary solution.  But let me be the first to tell you, it was incredible, extraordinary, and absolutely amazing!!!

I remember the first time I busted out a pair of scissors to cut out a small rectangle just the perfect width of my eye, with enough height to create a fake fold in my eyelid.  It took a few tries, but once I snuggled the tape onto my eyelid right at the base above my eyelashes, it was incredible.  Well, as long as I kept my eye open – it was incredible!  Big eyes!  Round eye!  Like white people!  So so beautiful.  I stood in front of the mirror on my closet door perfecting the cut of tape.  I still remember the little shreds of tape I practiced cutting that sat on the edge of the mirror as I attempted, one after another, to find the perfect one that would fit on my lid, stay in my lid when my eyes open, and hopefully not poke out too much when I closed my eye.  Most of the time, I’d blink and the tape would fold outward… with extended wear, the tape would start to wear off and it’d come off at the ends and I’d have an awkwardly hangnail of a scotch tape on my eye.  I tried not to blink often.  If only I could just keep my eyes open longer.  People would politely tell me that I had some tape on my eye.  Not immediately though, after staring closely at my eyes everytime I blinked because of the shine that would catch from the scotch tape. 

“There’s something on your eye.” 

“Wait, is that TAPE on your eye?”  The questions were always asked disbelievingly so. 

As if I had stepped into an asylum with a diagnosis of “wanting to be too white and have larger round eyes.” 

But guess who got the last laugh?  A few months into taping my eyes (yes, I did it every morning, and sometimes I redid it during the afternoon… it was high school after all), a natural super thin crease found its way to my eye all on its own.  I remember blinking in disbelief, looking at my own reflection of a double eyelid thinking – maybe I won’t need the eyelid surgery after graduation after all!  I took special care and made sure to wash my face gently as to not disturb the lid fold, in fear it would disappear on me if I washed too hard.  I felt good about the fact that I wouldn’t have to go under the knife.  I mean, it was a routine surgery, completely normal and almost expected.. but it was still surgery after all! Girls I knew would go to Taiwan for a quick trip and come back with some huge eyelids and some professional photos (more on that later too)!  Sometimes, girls would say it was because their eyes were too small and it was corrective, not cosmetic surgery.  Kind of like how white girls who get nose jobs blame it on a deviated septum. Every. Single. Time.  Whatever.  They looked good, especially with make-up on.  They made eyelid surgery very tempting except now I had one lid fold and only had to tape the other… so, how would the surgery work? 

            When my dad and mom caught on to my newfound love of scotch tape cut into little rectangles that sat atop my eyelids, they told me that I could get precut tape from Taiwan easily. 

            And they were holding this coveted information from me for how long?!  For almost sixteen years, they said nothing of the sort to me at all!  There was no mention of this incredible magical “tape” that was already PRECUT!  I was absolutely floored.  I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some.  I had all my friends who visited Taiwan annually get me some, I told my aunts and uncles who lived overseas to bring me back some in the summer, and I bought enough to last me a lifetime the summer of 2002.  Yes, I used tape from 1996 to 2002 and some….   

            The legit precut Taiwan eye tape was just as obvious as my DIY-Scotch tape version, only it was less itchy and because it was precut, I started to get creative with putting black eyeliner on it before taping it onto my lids.  But still, every time I blinked, this huge black thing would stick out of my eye, making people think I had some weird thing on my eye.  Except the other Asian girls who did the same thing, they always understood and silently approved and fist bumped me in the air every time we walked by each other. 

            My best friend was one of these so called Asian gals.  We couldn’t get enough of taping our eyes.  It was free plastic surgery with no pain (the itchiness that came with the tape grew on us and we honestly never felt any pain from the rough edges of the tape when we used the tape dispenser’s knife). 

            And then one magical day, a few years into our college years, our eyelid lives got even better when I stumbled across … eye glue! 

            It was absolutely transforming.  We went from taping our eyelids everyday to gluing our eyelids everyday.  The packaging was direct from Japan, land of more Asians probably taping their eyes – but since Japan was on the verge of all fashion outbreaks even before Taiwan, they already had eye glue!

            The bottle looked just like a mascara bottle.  Only there was a funky little rake that came on top of the lid (this would be used to rake the eyelid into a double lid once the glue was applied).  Inside, it was glue – think eyelash glue, with a little brush that could be used to apply it softly across your lids.  Then, you’d utilize the rake to fold your eyelid in  and boom – you had double eyelids! 

            The downside to eyelid glue was that it was glue.  Glue is sticky.  Glue is unforgiving.  Mess up your fold and your eyelids would become victim to harsh rubbing and prying to rid the eyelid of the glue which would do its job and guess what?  Stick on!  Sometimes eyelashes were sacrificed.  Other times the folds were done too drastic and the eye would be WAY TOO BIG due to a humongous eyelid fold.  Most of the times though, it was absolutely wonderful. 

            Grace and I used eye glue everyday on our one lone eye without lids (she also had one lid miraculously show up after using eye tape for a few months).  We confessed to each other that we weren’t sure how this would play out once we had a serious boyfriend.  Would we let them in on the fact that one of our eyes was *gasp … a single eyelid?!  Or would we always make sure our eyelids were glued, even after marriage – we’d wake up in the morning and glue our eyelids before our husbands saw our heaven forbid – single eyelids?!   

And then a funny thing happened in my 20’s.  The left eyelid, the one I glued everyday.. it became more permanent after each gluing session and slowly, I had hope that it might one day become permanent!  I’d glue my eyelid every morning for a week, and sometimes, it’d still be there in the morning at the end of a long week.  I’d go by months before waking up to an eyelid that didn’t disappear.  But these few instances of a double eyelid on its own gave me hope.  Maybe I could get one without glue one day!  In the meantime, I kept at the eye glue.  Every single day.  I never work make-up religiously, but my eye glue?  I wouldn’t go out without it.  I even carried a little bottle with me in case I had to wash my face and the glue off and would need to reapply.  And with time, it slowly became more prominent of a lid without glue. Instead of months between an eyelid that stuck around in the morning, it’d become weeks, then days… and then one day, it just stuck around.  

they may be small folds, but they be folds regardless