10/28

            Today’s class was about race. Countless races exist in the world. The problem is that how do we identify each people’s races. Many people have mixed races and they are very complicated. The story of how the U.S. created the Census form was very deep and interesting for me. The changing of the boxes of races well described what the U.S. want at that time. If I just saw the questionnaire without explanations, I would not notice that the boxes were often related to the relationships between the countries and the U.S.

            The next thing we did was to divide people on pictures into 4 types of race, which are white, brown, yellow and black. It was difficult to identify what race these people are, because some people look both white and brown or black and white. This experience taught me how hard for us to recognize each people’s race. We also discussed which person is more beautiful than others. Criteria for beauty are different for everyone. No matter we all are Japanese and have similar economic circumstances, each students chose different person. This shows that the affirmation of Blumenbach was not quite accurate. I do not think that women who have double eyelids are always beautiful. Some women have single-edged eyelid but more beautiful than women who have big eyes. However, this is not true for some people. This discussion reminds me one interesting project conducted by Ester Honing, a journalist. She asked 40 people from 25 countries to make her beautiful by using Photoshop. She provided unedited photo of herself and people made some changes in order to approximate her to their ideal beauty. Each pictures made by each countries show the difference of the standard of what is considered to be beautiful well. I am really interested in this study because the idea of asking people to make herself beautiful by using Photoshop is quite unique and easy to grab people’s attention. Though the way of proving the criteria for beauty of each country are not really scientific or academic and it does not mean that the result showed the standard of beauty accurately, it was still interesting to see these outcomes.

Argentina

the United States

   Photos from her blog post (http://www.estherhonig.com/#!before--after-/cvkn)

            This project had an impact on me deciding my second essay topic. Since I found this project interesting, I decided to write something about beauty. My second essay topic will be about the beauty pageant. Whether the beauty contests are good for females or not is always controversial topic. I hope I could write something interesting about this topic.