ganguro girls
July 11th 2007 02:04
When the ganguro (“black face”) style emerged amongst Japanese teenage girls in the 1990s it caused a stir. Long bleached and colored hair, vinyl, hot pink, sequins, animal prints, think eyeliner, feathers, fur, glitter and faux flowers started to pop up across the nation, as did fake tan salons. The fashion peaked in popularity around 2000 but ganguro girls can still be found in the arcades and sticker photo booths of Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
While it was seen as a subversive style, counter to the culture’s conventional notions of beauty and femininity, elaborate costume and face altering is actually firmly rooted in Japanese tradition. Noh masks are intrinsic to the kabuki performances and geishas plaster themselves in white makeup before painting high eyebrows and staining the lips blood red.
(In the Heian period eyebrows were also routinely removed and teeth and gums were blackened with a mix of ferrous oxide, tea and sake. They say led poisoning induces rage and aggression [the Romans drank from led cups so that might explain all the warfare and arrogance]... Imagine it: graceful and frail Japanese ladies with stone white faces, no eyebrows and black teeth, starting to get very angry.)
After a series of led poisoning deaths the government banished the face-whitening ingredients in 1870. But many whitening products are available today as the Japanese continued to value pale skin, which originally signified being rich enough to not have to work outside, like the weather-beaten peasants. Who had deep golden tans like the ganguro girls are lining up for at solariums right now.
“If man were never to fade away … but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is uncertainty”
(Yoshida Kenko in his Essays in Idleness, 1330s)
(Yoshida Kenko in his Essays in Idleness, 1330s)
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