Lipstick in kindergarten? South Korea’s K-beauty industry now targets those barely able to read.

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PriPara Kids Cafe is one of the many beauty parlors in South Korea that cater to young girls. (Jean Chung/For The Washington Post)

Last year in kindergarten, Yang Hye-ji developed her morning routine. Uniform? Check. Homework? Check.

Makeup? Definitely.

“Makeup makes me look pretty,” the 7-year-old said on her second visit to the ShuShu & Sassy beauty spa in Seoul.

She was wrapped in a child-size pink robe and wearing a bunny hairband. Her face was gently touched up with a puff. Her lips got a swipe of pink gloss.

South Korea’s cosmetics industry, known as K-beauty, has become an Asian powerhouse and global phenomenon for its rigorous step-by-step regimens.

But exacting beauty norms also put enormous pressure on South Korean women, making the country one of the world’s centers for plastic surgery. And increasingly, the beauty industry is looking at younger and younger girls.

Continue reading… “Lipstick in kindergarten? South Korea’s K-beauty industry now targets those barely able to read.”

Makeup may be the key to a woman’s success

Models with no makeup and natural, professional and glamorous makeup.

In a recent study  from the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Procter & Gamble, and Boston University, they had a sampling of over 200 individuals, both men and women, participants rated women wearing makeup as more competent than women without makeup.

 

 

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How to make yourself into a doll

VenusAngelic, a prominent, 15-year-old member of online ball-jointed-doll fandom, describes how she uses cosmetics to make herself look like a doll, narrating it in a kind of whispering, Asian-inflected voice. I confess that this isn’t my subculture or interest, and VenusAngelic’s opening remarks, “Hello my dolly molly inky pinky cotton candy clouds!” are not the sort of thing that I’d be likely to say to other people. But VenusAngelic’s cultural identity seems to me to have the kind of deeply transgressive edge that characterizes the best teenaged subcultures, the kind of thing that evokes panicked, hostile, knee-jerk reactions from grownups. The YouTube comments on her video are a kind of pure, distilled youtubidity — vile, misogynist, patronizing, incoherent — which suggests that she’s touching a nerve…

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10 craziest fashions of 2011

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The Rodnik Band’s urinal dress took three weeks of sequin applying and embroidering to make.

Potty dress, glass bikinis, eyelash jewelry, hair necklaces: The list of 2011’s wackiest fashions runs on and on. Whether you liked them or not, or were even brave enough to try them, these styles certainly gave us our money’s worth in entertainment value. (pics)

Here are 10 favorites:

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