Every beauty product worth buying in a Japanese chemist
The internet has caused havoc with our faces. Thankfully, the Japanese have some affordable answers
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The first thing you notice in Japan are the faces. Women’s lips are small and neat. There are no dramatic contour stripes down anyone’s cheekbones. No one has ‘baked’ under eyes, or ombre ‘power' brows. No-one’s face looks as though it is held in place by marionette strings held taut by the gods. I had almost forgotten faces could look like this. It is as though the internet age has passed Japan’s beauty industry by.
I say this because in the last twenty years, our online life has dramatically altered our faces- both how we see them and how we present them to the world. Today beauty is internet culture. Or rather I should say, internet culture is now basically the beauty industry. The biggest communities on Tik Tok are dedicated to beauty. Some of the highest paid You Tubers in the world are beauty influencers. Instagram is filled with beauty Reels showing you how to do everything from DIY nose jobs to obtaining ‘glass’ skin. And beauty brands and writers and everyone else who plays their role in the multi billion dollar beauty industry is but a hand maiden to the algorithms behind it all. This is frightening, because their business is your face. And in Internet Land, quick, easy, exaggerated beauty wins. No one is interested in simple old faces anymore. Decent, good old-fashioned skin is quite simply that: old-fashioned. We have ring lights and the Paris filter for that. Just as the internet messed with our brains, it’s doing the same with our faces.
You see, concepts of beauty are different in Internet Land. In Internet Land volume looks sort of okay. Juicy lips, fat lashes and filler that makes cheeks as round as basketballs sort of works when viewed from behind several different filters and shot from above. Textureless faces are the norm in Internet Land. I mean, can you remember the last time you saw a crinkled foreheads or a pair of gently puckered jowls on Instagram or Tik Tok? In Internet Land brows are not thin or sparse. Instead they are thick, black tadpoles cavorting across foreheads. Noses are contoured nuggets; jaws smooth as marble. Everyone, and I mean everyone, looks at least twenty per cent prettier on the internet. And then you meet them in the flesh.
In Japan, ‘flesh’ counts. Or more precisely skin counts. The Japanese have long had a fascination with skincare, following a simple 4-step routine (double cleanse, essence, moisturise, SPF) for generations. Japanese women spend a good portion of their money on skincare. Investment in; investment out. And boy does it show.
I have been travelling through Japan for the last ten days and the thing that strikes me about every woman from 18 to 80 is their skin. It is immaculate. It is skin that has real texture. It is skin that sags a little; puckers a touch here and there and skin that even has a little sun damage. (Do not believe the trope that Japanese women have pale, pigment-free faces. Only the ones who live under umbrellas get to have that. And what fun is that?) They understand that the largest organ in the entire body needs to be treated just so. And I’ve figured out how they do it: Japanese chemists.