Please skip this post if you don't want to hear me rant.
Which continent's eyes were you born with? African? American? Hmmm...maybe Asian? What do African eyes look like? I don't know, but I can tell you what Asian eyes look like:
Yep! According to the people at Maybelline, that's what "Asian" eyes look like. Do they look familiar to you? Have you seen them before? Here, let me help trigger your memory.
The infamous "Chinky eyes" taunt, experienced at least once by every East Asian person living in a non East Asian country, has been given the official Maybelline stamp of approval.
Yes folks, Maybelline concurs with all those playground bullys who used to walk up to you, pulled up the outer corners of their eyes with their index fingers and claimed that they could blindfold you with a piece of dental floss because you have "Chinky eyes".
Feeding into a discrimatory stereotype much?
According to Maybelline, all Asians have eyes with "a distinctive lift at the outer corners and very little lid". Yes, this applies to ALL Asian people, including Indian, Indonesian, Phillippino, Nepalese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Yemenese, Israelian, Lebonese, Turkish, Iranian....need I go on? Do they even realise how many different countries and nationalities fall under Asian?
Hello Aishwarya, you don't have Asian eyes!!! You must not be Asian!!!
I don't know how this works really, are you Asian if you have those eyes, or is an Asian person no longer Asian if they don't have Asian eyes? Here are my eyes, no glue, no tape, no surgery, no makeup:
I'm probably biased, but to me, they look more like these:
Does this mean that I'm not Asian or my eyes aren't Asian? Does hailing from the Asian continent mean that you're automatically preclude from having "Centered eyes that are one eye-length apart and have uniform features."?
I wouldn't have such a big problem with this if they had choices for say, European eyes, African eyes, and American eyes. Why are all the other choices based on the physical characteristics of your eye, and then they suddenly have one based on a continent? Did someone at Maybelline headquarters just not bother to look up how many different eye shapes people from the Asian continent has? It's like as if they had listed different types of noses, high bridged, flattened tip, wide based, upturned and then "American". Would you find have found that offensive? Do we not deserve to choose based on the physical attributes of our eyes? It's as if by belonging to a certain continent, we can only have 1 eye type, and hey sorry for you, but that happens to be Chinky eyes.
This is my boycott, I went through my makeup stash and isolated every Maybelline product I owned, and I put it right where I think their company and its generalisations should go, straight into the bin. I know it's not much, heck it's only 2 mascaras, but I need to drive my message home. Further, I shall never purchase their products again.
Maybelline, shame on you!
Edit: As of this post's publish date, Maybelline has changed the descriptions on their website. This is what it currently looks like:
I have no bloody clue what shapes eyes come in other than "Almond", but hey it's a whole lot better than slanty eyes. Maybe there's people out there with square eyes.
If you want to see what the original website descriptions looked like prior to the change, please head over to my friend Rasilla's post where she has taken a video documenting the original site. She's the one who discovered this atrocity in the first place, and she's also the one who sent COUNTLESS correspondence to the unresponsive Maybelline reps in an attempt to bring this to their attention. Read her post with the frustrating e-mail exchange.
End rant.
