I came across this article, "13 Asians on Identity and The Struggles of Loving Their Eyes" by the Huffington Post a few years ago and it left me with many thoughts.

I grew up hearing, "you have big eyes for an Asian" to "your eyes would be just a bit more pretty if you had double eyelids" to "you're so lucky you have big eyes" to even, "why aren't your eyes smaller, don't all Asians have really small eyes?" All these statements left me feeling extremely uncomfortable.

When I was in high school, I will admit that I too wondered what it would be like to have double eyelids, so one day, I did a quick YouTube search on - how to create double eyelids using tape. I wanted to feed my curiosity and see what I would look like and whether this "double eyelid" life was that much better than a monolid one.

For majority of my life, I had monolids. I would get an occasional crease on my left eye when I didn't get enough sleep, but during my second semester of college, I one day noticed that the crease on my left eye was here to stay. To be honest, I was pretty upset about this because by this time of my life, I was happy with my eyes but now, I landed in both worlds. I tried so many different makeup techniques to make my eyes look even, but of course nothing worked, so I instead ended up spending majority of my college career feeling insecure about my uneven eyes and always covering half of my face in photos.

One few years ago, someone mentioned how they were able to naturally teach their eyelids to become double by using double eyelid tape (like one of these). There was no way my left eye was going to go back to being a monolid, so I bit my tongue and tried this tape method out for a bit. A few months later, my right eye started to form its own double eyelid, and that too ended up sticking around (well, 90% of the time without makeup and 100% with makeup).

I now live in yet another insecure world about my eyes and caring too much about whether people think I got plastic surgery, but I’ve been feeling less and less insecure about it lately.

And so, having lived both the mono and double eyelids, is one really better than the other?

I don’t think it’s fair to pick a side because they’re both equally beautiful and God made you in the way you are today for a reason. I know so many people who hates their mono eyelids/get plastic surgery to get double eyelids. I’m not saying plastic surgery is wrong, but in my opinion, there truly is something so beautiful mono eyelids.

*note: this was a post i wrote back in 2017 and only published it now (after updating it a bit) because I was too scared to publicize it.

Monolids vs. Double Eyelids