In between videos of 15-second dances and POV’s, a disturbing beauty trend has emerged on TikTok: “fox eyes.” For those blissfully unaware, “fox eyes” refers to a specific eye shape and makeup style: slightly upturned, almond eyes, usually accented by a brown smoky liner and a straight brow. The blueprint is, of course, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, or any of the other exoticized white models du jour. Ever the innovators, TikTok teens have taken to shaving off the ends of their brows to achieve the look, while others pull their eyes back with their hands, or, more extremely, pull hair back from the temples to pull their skin (and eyes) into a new shape. These gestures in particular are troubling, as they recall racist gestures made toward East Asian people, as many Asian TikTokkers have pointed out. They rightly call the trend out for taking a feature of racist bullying and turning it into a momentary beauty ideal. Most importantly, one can’t fulfill this ideal by naturally having the features, but by manipulating the face to achieve a look typically associated with another race. 

Fox eyes are hardly the only index of this. The rising trend of white social media stars getting fake tans and appropriative Black hairstyles has been dubbed “blackfishing,” a play on “catfishing,” as influencers attempt to appear Black, or “biracial”, without being subject to the consequences of anti-Blackness and racism. Critics like Lauren Michele Jackson have written at length about the semi-misnomer of “blackfishing” — the perpetrators don’t actually want to be Black, they want the particular clout and financial gain of embodying Black aesthetics in a non-Black body à la Kardashian. This is the crux of these trends: they are about achieving a suggestion of ethnic ambiguity that doesn’t stray too far from whiteness.

Given that the very foundation of beauty ideals in the West is predicated upon racism, these trends come as no surprise. On the surface, the shift from defining “classic beauty” around white European features to this new composite of various non-White features might seem like progress, but it is actually profoundly insidious. To have the intended impact, these features must be expressed on a white or white-adjacent person — “fox eyes” is not about seeing Asian people as beautiful, it’s about seeing a feature cut from the racialized person and pasted upon a white person, as beautiful. It is appropriation, not appreciation. It’s also dehumanization.

This slide towards an ethnically ambiguous beauty ideal is indicative of eugenicist  racial-mixing thought, and recalls that infamous National Geographic photo story. If mixed people are construed as more beautiful (and the mix in question is nearly always one that includes whiteness or proximity to it), it is the literal breeding out of certain racialized traits and the fetishization of others that makes them so. Now, we are seeing this idea taken even further as white people scramble to fulfill this pseudo-mixed-race ideal. 

The online world enables this to an alarming degree. Trends take off and are thoughtlessly imitated by thousands of people (in the case of fox eyes, many of them teenagers). Trends change faster than one can keep up, moving the goalposts of beauty at lightning speed, seemingly always toward still being resolutely racist but with more steps involved to feign political “wokeness” (a word that’s similarly been digitized and appropriated, which feels fitting). Stripped of the idea of being a “TikTok makeup technique” or “Instagram modeling pose,” the fox eyes trend bears a striking resemblance to old Hollywood yellowface, but there is something about both the internet and the perceived frivolity or inconsequentiality of beauty that has allowed many of these trends to go unchecked. 

We understand beauty trends, especially those popularized among teens online, as ill-advised but nonetheless harmless expressions of herd mentality. Indeed, I doubt the kids are aware of how they contribute to the racist restructuring of beauty standards, but most people are not aware of how structures of power inform their understandings and behaviors, especially “personal” ones like beauty choices. That said, when it feels as though we are two trend cycles away from bringing back phrenology under a more hashtagable name, it is far past time to pay attention. If teens are mere sheep, look for the shepherd.