Adam,
as long as it is balanced out, taking care of herself is good. physical attraction is also a gift from heaven as well as heart.
A lot of young women are obsessed about appearance but it is understandable. Appearance is easy to recognise and it is easier to make up more than cultivating inner self. young people don’t have enough time to find out the personality so much because they need to know a lot of people and what are out there.
young is good. because it doesn’t last forever. only limited time, they can enjoy it.they can make the most of it. Keep trying everything and learning from mistakes.
but after being grown up, inner fertility tells the person who he/she is. what they learned from experience tells. if he/she is still immature after growing up, it is a problem though.

About Japan, Japanese males put too much value on young women. I don’t know anywhere else where over thirty guys love low teen singers such as Morning Musume. I hope Japan will change.

There are people who personally consider heavily-made-up women more attractive, yes. There are people who hate make-up for its artificiality, or its impracticality, and there are people like me who recoil from heavy makeup because of what it says about a person’s values.

And I’ve heard there are even some people who couldn’t care less what someone looks like from the outside, as hard as that may be to believe.

But still more importantly, it seems to me that what *anyone* thinks about the person inside the cosmetic mask is less important than that person’s own thoughts. If you personally enjoy slappin’ on the layers of makeup you describe, great. If you don’t, great. Why should anyone else’s opinion make any difference at all?

Isn’t this what forty-five years of global feminism have been about, at least in part? I know Japan is not, and should not be, America, or anywhere else, but geez, haven’t you ever heard of Betty Friedan?

I surely hope this is meant ironically.

“They use proper cosmetics to make pores virtually imperceptible, put on foundation carefully, apply finishing powder, draw eyebrows perfectly, putting on eye liners with consummate skill and use three kinds of mascaras. But it doesn’t look like “too much” make up at all. It looks like with no make-up on. It is called “Natural Make” in Japanese.”

This all makes me want to scream: “What’s wrong with pores? Human beings have pores, you know. Pimples, too. In fact, human beings sweat, sneeze, fart, have hairs grow in inconvenient places…”

What you’re describing, it seems to me, has nothing to do with beauty. It is, rather, a detailed program for the complete obliteration of nature and its replacement by a smooth, sweatless, nanometer-scale facade.

Women who do this are daily designing a skin job in front of the mirror. That terrifies me.

I would, however, be interested in learning more about how such a large proportion of Japanese women came to hold such beliefs about their own bodies. It can’t all be Shiseido ads.

Very interesting blog and worthy of a documentary.

“Perhaps Japanese’ manual dexterity are genetically programmed.”

Warm Regards,
Chester

Chester P. Bateman
Assistant to the Dean for Technology
Oregon State University
School of Education
418 Education Hall
200 SW 15th Street
Corvallis, Oregon 97331-3502
Office: (541) 737-8836
Fax: (541) 737-8971
http://oregonstate.edu/education/