Anime Plastic Surgery: Chinese youth create new beauty standards

To maintain a high level of portrayed online beauty, the process of doctoring photos has led to an increased level of "editorial control." Blemishes are quickly erased and skin tones effortlessly lightened. Facial shapes are altered and enhanced, especially around the eyes. The authors observed that, "These girls are all Adobe experts," highly proficient with photo-editing software like Photoshop.

Keeping up with one's digitally-manipulated appearance once offline requires becoming equally skilled with more traditional methods of physical enhancement such as using cosmetics in more intricate and creative ways.

Between online and offline efforts, demands on time and energy are high. And the phenomenon is by no means exclusive to China but widespread throughout Asia and beyond.

Then there is the prospect that the younger generation may be constructing an impossible standard of beauty, one that moves away from the natural state and more towards the contrived and artificial, all but forcing the need to use "beautification alternatives" like plastic surgery just to stand out in the slightest.

The authors raise the question: Is the trend towards manufactured beauty a result of the Korean wave or perhaps just the "natural conclusion of a furious beauty economy"?

APSG comment: And what might come next? More exotic or even perverse forms of body modification? Or the opposite -- a backlash with return to the pure and natural?