I’m sure any of you who have looked carefully at a Chinese face have noticed that our eyes are shaped vastly differently from our Caucasian counterparts.  We have these crazy eyelids that kind of fold into themselves from the eyelash area when we open our eyes, whereas Caucasians have a crease at the top of their eyelid where the skin folds in.  Sometimes we’ll get this crease in the middle of our eyelid, toward the bottom and our eyes will start to fold in from there.  Well, in Chinese culture, it is considered attractive to have that look, which is called “double eyelids” because now it looks like there are two parts, separated by the flap.

I naturally do not have double eyelids, merely single ones, but as a child, if I rubbed my eyes a lot, sometimes I could get a temporary crease.  When I went back to China after high school, I took some glamor shots at a studio, where they taped little clear crescents onto my eyelids to simulate the look.  It was fascinating to me that they would do that and I’ve always wondered if it really does look better.  It certainly gives my eyes a little more dimension and now eyeliner applied along the top layer of lashes wouldn’t get buried in the depths of my eye when I opened them.  It makes for more “Western” eyes, which, perhaps, is the point?  It feels weird though, to have this crease in my eye, with skin folding up around it and sometimes I wonder if it’s one of those things like a displaced joint that needs a little boost to get back into place.  There’s certainly a kind of pressure there and opening my eyes larger makes that feeling even more pronounced.

Sometime while I was in Singapore (and I didn’t notice at all), I somehow developed a double eyelid.  That’s right, just one.  So now my eyes are uneven (much like everything else in my body) and I wonder if one eye looks bigger because of this incongruency.  It’s kind of cool and it has been pretty permanent, but I wonder how long this will last.  Will the other eye change too?  Will this one go back?  Or am I stuck with one single eyelid and one double eyelid?  Since I have no idea how I got the first one to begin with, I have no idea how to make my other eyelid like that, or undo this one.  I guess it’s fun though, to observe the differences side by side and feel the differences when I open my eyes.