LAUAN501 : Asian beauty

During this research, one of the comparisons that can be made between western and Japanese character design is that they all adhere pretty closely to the "standards" of beauty between different region. Whereas in the West , girls tend to favour a strong, athletic, sexy type of beauty ( tanned skin, long legs, prominent bum via Kim Kardashian / Victoria Secret's model", Japanese, and to a larger extent, Asian women tends to favour a more delicate and gentle side of beauty, such as a smaller face, smaller, lips, thin arms/legs, more rounded / bigger eyes... etc. 

This does not limit to appearance only but to manners as well, with the ideal "personalities" of Asian woman is calm, gentle ,pure and innocent, (even submissive in many case)  which of course is not true for all Asian woman , but has be come more or less of a stereotypical idea. These ideal character traits find it roots in ancient times with a man-dominated feudal society and has remained prominent even as Western influence gains more ground in Asia and old traditions are slowly breaking down.

 

The most prominent among these traits, has to be the obsession of keeping a white skin. 

Skin is everything, this coming from both observation of Asian culture and personal experience of participating in it as an Asian myself. A white skin is said, symbolise a position of wealth and power in society, stemming from the fact that you're not getting darker for working in the fields all day aka you're not a peasant. This remains in many cases true for developing countries like Vietnam and China, where there's a clash between the rising middle class of the cities and the working class in the countryside. In many Asian nations though, it is now consider a major point of attractiveness for girls and people have come up various way to achieve it. In Vietnam, women cover every inch of their body with jackets, gloves and aprons when they go out on their bike. In Korean, the beauty trend is not just white but reflective porcelain-like skin via skin-care product. In Japan, there are the Bihakus, who produce skin-whitening products... Even observing my girlfriend, the effort she goes through every night applying skin-care products is nothing short of extraordinary.

All of this then translate to Asian female character design preference, in particular, in the average Anime / manga series, there are rarely any 'tanned' characters ( even more so if we're talking about main characters). Moreover, much of the bishojou trait utilise other aspect of tradtional asian beauty as well, most prominently , the small face, larger eyes and slender limbs.