Face tape and fox eyes might both be about lifting and sculpting, but one is just good old-fashioned makeup sorcery, and the other? A little too close to racial cosplay. If you’ve ever seen Doechii’s brows defy gravity, you’ve witnessed face tape at its finest. If you’ve ever cringed at Ariana Grande’s “suddenly Asian” phase, you already know where this is going.
When the fox eye trend took off, every influencer and their mom started pulling at their temples, stretching their eyes, and calling it “modelesque”, as if they’d just unlocked the secret to high fashion. Meanwhile, Asian folks everywhere had flashbacks to playground bullies doing the exact same thing—only back then, it was a joke at their expense. Almond-shaped and monolid eyes have been exoticized, mocked, and misunderstood for ages. They’ve been called “sleepy,” “foreign,” or used as shorthand for a villain in Hollywood. But slap some liner on and suddenly it’s aspirational—just as long as it’s not on an actual Asian person.
It’s giving Asian fishing, the same way suddenly tan, dark-haired pop stars started serving “mystical Japanese princess” energy whenever they needed an aesthetic rebrand. (Looking at you, Ari.) The same eye shape that Asian folks were pressured to surgically alter was suddenly the hottest look of the season—just not when it was naturally occurring. Funny how that works.
Face tape, on the other hand, is just good old-fashioned trickery, like overlining your lips or contouring your nose. It’s been a staple in drag, theatre, and Hollywood for decades, long before TikTok got its hands on it. The key difference? Face tape isn’t about mimicking a racialized feature—it’s just enhancing what’s already there. It lifts, smooths, and snatches, but it doesn’t borrow from a specific ethnic group’s features and call it a trend. No one’s out here claiming Doechii at the Grammys are problematic just because she made good use of some well-placed tape.
That’s the thing about makeup—it’s fun, it’s transformative, and it’s meant to be played with. But if a trend only becomes aspirational when it’s stripped away from the people who naturally have that feature, it’s time to ask why. Snatch your brows, contour your cheekbones, tape to your heart’s content—but if the pose involves stretching your temples and calling it editorial, maybe… don’t.
