POOP-DE-DO0! —FECAL FACIAL IS LATEST WACKY SKIN TREATMENT— April 29, 2008 — New York Post….just $216, Shizuka Bernstein will slather your face in feces for a full 50 minutes - what she calls the “Geisha Facial” - at her Midtown spa, Shizuka New York. The ancient Japanese cleanser - geisha and kabuki dancers have been using the bird poop to wash off their heavy white makeup…more…
My previous 3Yen report of August 5, 2005….
Let’s white happy!
While I’m in the drug store in Japan, I always find aisles devoted solely to skin whitening products. And my favorite traditional Japanese product for skin whitening is uguisu no fun aka swallow nightingale droppings. Being Bihaku ) or a ‘white beauty’ is hot shit here in Japan.
In a machine translation of the product description ofuguisu-no-fun, the cosmetics company uguisunofun.com says to whiten your skin you should take from 0.5 to 1.0 grams (about 1/3 of teaspoon) of the bird poop powder and mix it with soap in your palm and wash your face in the regular manner. Product No. 151 Container (26 g), price: 1,029 yen.
As Japanese love to quote the old Chinese saying: “Being white can cover/compensate for three times of ugliness. ” In the past months that I’ve spent in the hospital, the Japanese student nurses lube me up with NIVEA Whitening Body Lotion after my sponge bath and I always teased them I might disappear into the sheets.
For some women, it’s beauty and the bleach Concord Monitor—-
….Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves such as Monterey Park and Irvine, and you’ll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas - even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket. While driving, many wear special “UV gloves”- which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns - to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder’s masks….There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman’s face in a procedure known as a “mesofacial.” Whitening products have been a mainstay in Asia for decades, but cosmetics-industry officials said they have emerged as a hot seller in the United States …..….more….
Typical Japanese bihaku ads for skin whitening products (mostly fraudulent and ineffective like my hospital’s Whitening Body Lotion).
I just floating away this looooooong Japanese “Golden Week” holiday just like this you lovely at the faux-Dead Sea pool at the Yunessun Spa in Hakone, a couple of hours outside of Tokyo.
“The opportunity when Japan turns into Western clothes from Japanese binding is said to be the uniform introduction of the early period of Meiji.” (sic)
Here’s a photo from my secret Tokyo girlfriend, “KeitaiGoddess” about an odd Japanese folkway: Arranging PET bottles of water will scare cats away from a building.
I wonder if they are there other countries where people are so dullible* to think that cats even notice this? *”Dullible” Ha, ha, now that’s a stupid-but-so-true Freudian mistake for ‘gullible’.
PET bottle incident –
There has been false information circulating that filling PET bottles with water and leaving around building entrances will discourage alley cats. This has resulted in an odd kind of spectacle of water-filled bottles being placed everywhere. However, there have same cases reported that these bottles have caused incidents when the water in a PET bottle focused sunlight enough to start a fire.
UPDATE:
According to Boing-Boing seems there’s a “BUG-scare BAG” has spread to California from a kibbutz in Israel that is used in similar way as the Japanese Cat-scare Bottle. Although April Fools seems to have come a bit late, these plastic bags filled with water, and hung from tree branches to scare the bugs away.
SeeBoing-Boing for more silliness and many informative/funny comments about the “BUG-scare BAG.”
Here by my home on Sakarazaka in south Denenchofu Tokyo it’s “snowing” …
… The fallen cherry blossoms are making sad drifts by the curbs.
花吹雪 via nodoca’s flickr.
This ain’t exactly “news,” but the Japanese blogosphere today showing photos of this crocodile sashimi featured at a grand opening of a Japanese Jusco supermarket in Shenzhen China just north of Hong Kong.
Served in sushi restarants, Japanese sashimi is just raw fish without any sushi rice or nori /seaweed wrapped around it. However, the black skin makes this sliced crocodile look like a giant maki sushi roll. [Wikipedia]
I ‘m going to burn for posting three randy topics in a row, but if you hurry before the YouTube censors ban this, check out the “Invisible Man” Japanese style.
“Happyhorizon san, the author/poster of this video says in Japanese that the video, “…is only slightly naughty, such a mischief seems to be OK.” (The video came from a recent variety show on Japanese TV.) Click to view.
Today, the mega-popular website Boing-Boing just discovered the “Video of creepy eyelid-poking beauty tip” that has been the all-time favorite of readers here on the 3Yen since 2005*, Japanese Makeup Lesson in Eye Torture.
A common sight in Japan are women (and men) blithely toweling on makeup* as they barrel along riding on Japanese commuter trains. However, for some strange reason I never see them do this eyeball forking, hee, hee.
The most popular plastic surgery procedure for Japanese and Asians the so-called “double eyelid” surgery to make slanted eyes rounder. Continuing on the same vein that I mentioned in Vibrator glasses for a “taller” nose to raise the bridge of the nose, here’s a “Makeup Lesson” for eye gluing and taping to simulate round eyes. See it as makeup lesson as a video and here as still pictures in plain HTML as shown below
Via Weekly Teinou * Woman which means this BoinBoing news item has been floating around the Japanese blogosphere since 2004.
Here are some more horrific pictures of this meaningless “beauty” procedure.
While driving, many wear special “UV gloves”- which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns - to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder’s masks….There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman’s face in a procedure known as a “mesofacial.” Whitening products have been a mainstay in Asia for decades, but cosmetics-industry officials said they have emerged as a hot seller in the United States …..….more….
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Tombow Corporation’s 
Click to enlarge.
