Your Eyelids and You

So I've got this really wacky class of kids, and they usually spend every moment in class that they possibly can screwing around. Yesterday two of the boys in the class, Nate and Richard, started showing everyone their talent for forcing a crease in their natural epicanthal folds. Here's Nate in his normal state

And here's Nate after giving himself a 'double eyelid' or ssangcouple (쌍꺼풀) as they say round these parts.

Yes, Nate is kind of cross-eyed in these pictures, because he chose to stare directly into the camera four inches in front of his face.

Here's Richard before creasing

And after

Very sultry.

The topic of double eyelid surgery or ssangcouple surgery (technically Asian blepharoplasty), as I'm going to choose to call it, is a complex one. So many of my friends here in Korea have had the surgery both before and after I've met them. The results vary from attractive and natural to jarring and artificial. The motives usually involve making the eye look bigger and more attractive, although some claim that they've been ordered to do so by their doctors for various reasons. Korea's president Roh Mu-hyun had the surgery last year, but I highly doubt he did it for aesthetic reasons. The word on the street is that heavy epicanthal folds get heavier as life goes on, and eventually they can weigh heavily on the eyelashes, which I guess is what happened to Roh. Here he is before and after
Limpid pools.

Here is a somewhat more typical before and after pair from an actual advertisement for a hospital that performs this procedure
To get an idea of how big a deal all this ssangcouple stuff is, check out all the people who posted pictures of themselves and their ssangcouples. Truly staggering, the number of people crowing about their new ssangcouples, their babies' ssangcouples, and anything that even looks remotely double-lidded.

According to the website of Dr. Frank Meronk, a plastic surgeon specializing in Asian patients based in Santa Barbara

Irrespective of ethnicity, an upper eyelid is typically considered more attractive by most people if it lacks excessive skin and fat, possesses a reasonably defined crease (which makes the eye appear bigger--a universal signal of youth and attention), and displays at least some platform of exposed skin between the crease and the eyelashes (which, in ladies, allows for a more effective application of makeup).

Furthermore

[M]ost experienced eyelid surgeons agree that the qualities noted here are generally appreciated across many diverse cultures and not solely a matter of Western bias.

This website is truly fascinating and has a lot to teach us about the procedure, but be warned that it does contain graphic images. I just accidentally exposed a bunch of little kids to an interior view of uneven fat deposits in a Vietnamese lady's eyelid, which is a sight none of us is likely to forget soon.

I don't know what you think about this procedure and I frankly don't know which side of the issue I am on, but I do know that ssangcouples make it possible for Richard to do his signature "haughty seductive CEO" face.

The Nicest People in the World

That's America. We are so nice, even in war. If you want your mind blown, go check out What's in a Number? on the This American Life website. The show (in three acts, as Ira Glass is wont to say) is about civilian casualties in Iraq. The first part of the show is about the making of the study in The Lancet that claimed 100,000 Iraqis dead since the beginning of the Iraq war. This story in itself is fascinating but it then takes a maniacal twist-turn when they talk to a Human Rights Watch figure who a) was integral in the precision bomb targeting of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle's bunkers and palaces and then quit his job at the Pentagon and b) went to Iraq with Human Rights Watch to survey the collateral damage of his own handiwork. He justifies his double life by saying that in both jobs he is "after the bad guys". He describes checking out bunkers that he'd looked at on satellite maps millions of times and seeing a hole bored through four floors by bunker busters to explode in the fourth floor down. That he had sent there from the Pentagon.
In the second act the story shifts to something many Americans have likely wondered about. Ryan Gist was placed in charge of an Iraqi town in which a mistake caused twelve people (some of them terrorists who had taken the town hostage). The broadcast features both an interview with Gist and actual audio from a meeting between Gist and the town bigwigs in the aftermath of the fuckup. Gist, like the Pentagon/Human Rights Watch guy, are full of good intentions. They, like all the planners of the war and all the soldiers on the ground, tried desperately to avoid civilian casualties.
But still, a lot of innocent people died. The gist of the program is that most of the civilians were killed by bombing, even though this was the most precision-bomb-intensive war of all time, a so-called "humane war". So even though everyone is doing their best to be nice and only kill the bad guys, they're still nicking a shit-load of the innocent bystanders in the process.