Who decided double eyelids are cuter? A Japanese student questions beauty norms

Who decided that double eyelids are cuter than monolids? That's the question a 20-year-old university student in Japan can't stop asking, and it hits a nerve in a country where cosmetic medicine keeps growing.

What happened?

In 2023, a major Japanese cosmetic clinic put ads on trains urging teenagers to get double-eyelid surgery. The ads caused a public row.

Mao Tsutsui, now 20 and a second-year at Tsuda University, was a first-year high school student then. She saw the ad on her commute and felt angry. "It's pressure to say double eyelids are cuter," she says.

She had never thought much about her monolids until she started watching makeup videos. The comments were full of people saying they hated heavy monolids or that they couldn't look cute with them.

She tried a cosmetic product to create a double eyelid, as her younger sister has. It felt off. What she likes is a crisp, composed look. She doesn't criticise people who choose a double eyelid, but she says monolids suit her best. Also, in the Edo period (1603–1868), narrow, elongated eyes were considered beautiful, she notes, so beauty standards change.

Why is everyone talking about it?

The numbers are rising. Research firm Yano Research Institute estimates Japan's cosmetic medicine market at 644 billion yen in 2025, up 2.1% on the year. In 2020, when COVID-19 spread, it was 405 billion yen, and it has grown every year since 2021.

In a 2023 survey of 400 women in their 20s to 50s, 200 had had cosmetic treatment. The top facial procedure was removing spots, bruises or moles. The second was double-eyelid surgery using the stitch method.

Photography researcher Mika Kobayashi, 53, says young people worry about their looks because they are constantly exposed to ads. She says ads that define a "cute me" through double eyelids alone are a problem.

A doctor sees it differently, in part. Koichi Haraoka of Osaka Metropolitan University says cosmetic surgery can ease appearance worries. He has treated women after breast cancer surgery and people whose skin became inflamed from eyelid makeup.

What's next?

Haraoka also warns about "complex businesses" that stoke insecurity with ads. He says the industry must not fuel lookism (discrimination based on appearance) or target young people, and that it needs ethics.

Tsutsui's answer is simple: she wants to keep to what she believes is cute.