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CHINA IS CRAZY FOR ELF EARS
In many cultures, ears that stick out too much from the skull are considered physical defects, but China’s “elf ears” cosmetic craze has received worldwide attention since 2021, when it was covered by some of the world’s largest news outlets after becoming a trending topic on Chinese social media.
It all started with a before-and-after photo posted on Weibo, China’s version of X (Twitter), by online influencer Chen Jia-nan who had recently undergone a procedure to make her ears more visible from the front. Chen believed that this minor change made her face look slimmer and younger.
Judging by the number of Chinese cosmetic clinics now offering the “elf ears” operation, she is definitely not the only one who thinks so. Many people are willing to go under the knife and pay big money to get protruding ears.
There is more than one way to achieve elf ears, which technically look more like Gollum's ears than those of J.R.R.Tolkien’s fantasy elf race in The Lord of the Rings.
One of the least drastic ways is to inject hyaluronic acid behind the ear lobes to make them stick out sideways, but it is only temporary, since the ears return to their original positions as the effect of the injections wears off.
For a permanent effect, plastic surgery clinics will insert a piece of cartilage behind the ear, but this is a more dangerous and expensive procedure.
For those who cannot afford these methods, there are special sticky tapes that push the ears outwards to achieve the elf ear look, although they do have the disadvantages of being visible from the back and even coming loose at inopportune moments.
As strange as it sounds to most Westerners, the protruding ears craze is definitely not the weirdest cosmetic procedure in China. That title goes to “calf blocking” where young women have “less important” nerves in their legs surgically severed to permanently shrink their calf muscles so that their lower legs appear slimmer and straighter.
Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, so who are we to judge?
SOURCE: odditycentral.com
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