Here's Why the Viral Fox-eye Makeup Challenge is Drawing Hate for Being Racist towards Asians

A trend or a cultural appropriation? Or just another branch of blackfishing? The social media trend on fox-eye make up has drawn flak over its perceived racial undertone aimed at Asians.

Fox-eye makeup is all about making one's eye appear more elongated, slender and angled upward by a combination of eye-shadow, eyeliner and fake lashes. Often the tail end of eyebrows are shaved only to be redrawn in a more angular manner and the look is further accentuated with a high ponytail that pulls back your hair tight and further lifts the eyes.

But what appears to be just another eye-make up trend, has underlying factors that might be offensive and racist towards Asians, and here's why.

Asians living in the predominantly non-Asian or white neighbourhoods in countries like the United States have often been subjected to trolling and ridicule for the shape of their eye.

"My eyes were considered undesirable. Other kids would taunt me and other Asian kids by pulling their eyes up, down or sideways to mimic us and ridicule smaller eyes and slanted eyes. They’d ask us if we could see out of them," said a London-based Asian actor to HuffPost.

Others, too feel the present trend is an action that has otherwise been used to demean Asians in the past.

They wish that if only these trendy look was used in a way to appreciate the features of Asians instead of making a trend out of it, and this doesn't do any justice to the cultural appropriation that has been so long used to fortify racism and has often caused a great deal of trauma to them.

"The cultural influencers from the dominant group legitimize it as a cool, style 'trend,' and in the process exoticizes and eroticizes it," said a sociology professor at the University of Kansas, reports CNN.

The trend that has been viral on social media since early this year, and was also popularized by popular Hollywood stars and influencers, has received a massive amount of backlash for ignoring the past racism associated with such eye features.

Many took to Twitter to express their displeasure towards this trend, which has been deemed as "a new trend that brings out old stereotypes and old taunts."

There has been a long-felt pressure on Asian to alter the shape of their 'ching chong eyes' or 'almond eyes' to make it appear larger through Blepharoplasty, a popular surgery in East Asian countries and among Asian Americans, that create double eyelids or a supratarsal eyelid crease. However, the trend was first popularised by Korean women trying to blend with the US crowd in the early 1950s.

As per the Huffpost report, this perspective still doesn't alter the belief system of many make-up artists, who stand firm by their ideology that fox-eye is a mere depiction of trying to create a straight, angular feature of fix's eyes and has little do with any racial gesture towards Asians.