elianne wrote:One of my Japanese friends actually did email me a list of Japanese magazines which can be found online. They can be rather painful to navigate until you figure it out by trial and error (I can't read Japanese to save my life and my friend has gone back to Japan) and they take up quite a bit of bandwidth. Dug them out of my email so here they are:
http://www.biteki.com/
http://www.s-woman.net/maquia/top.html
http://www.joseishi.net/voce/index.html
Biteki is quite pretty to flip through if you have an actual hard copy. I don't know if Kinokuniya Bookshop brings them into the US but I have seen one or two copies before in the Sydney outlet.
I can ask around for Korean websites if anyone is interested.
Thanks for the links, elianne : )
These three are the biggest beauty mags in Japan and are also widely available in Taiwan (no relation to Thailand, with which it's often mistaken), which is where I am. However, the contents available online are vastly different from what's in their physical publications, of which only a very limited preview is available online. The most important is, you'd not find makeup demos on their sites, only pictures of the products themselves.
Here are the linkable contents pages for the current issues of VoCE and MAQUIA:
VoCE
http://i-voce.boxerblog.com/contents/
Go down a bit, and click on the page scans for slightly larger pictures
MAQUIA
http://dpm.s-woman.net/maquia/200810/index.html?page=0
Click on the arrowed buttons on the upper right corner above the digital version to flip the pages.
MAQUIA has recently launched a beauty blogging site, but my impression after a random stroll is that there aren't plenty of posts on makeup (Japanese women, while meticulous with their makeup, are more enthusiastic about skincare) and those that are are generally accompanied by fuzzy photos taken with a camera phone.
Here's the blog index on the MAQUIA beauty blogging site:
http://maquiaonline.com/maquia/100club_diary/index.html
The tiny profile photos provide a general impression of what is worn; however, no larger versions are available.
The ones with flawless alabaster skin are the beauty ideal.
I've got my hands on the latest issue of MAQUIA and have scanned the relevant pages, the ones with makeup demos that also serve to illustrate the general aesthetics, trends and the colors that work. Because most Japanese fashion rags have practical makeup features every now and then, I had never bought a single copy of Japanese beauty mag until a couple days ago. (Japanese beauty mags are intimidating hefty affairs that generally have more pages than their fashion counterparts.) Boy did I know how dedicated Japanese women are to their skincare routine! Only about 1/4 of the 372-page volume is about makeup, and a lot of them are about achieving the porcelain skin look with the various foundation application techniques.
Due to the spreading popularity of Korean TV dramas, Korean beauty brands and a few fashion mags have also gained new found influence in other (Asian) countries. As I don't watch TV and my knowledge of local pop culture is superficial, I have only a general, vague impression of what the current Korean makeup aesthetic is like (somewhat different from what I saw on my Korean classmates when I was in Canadian high school and college a few years back, btw). It seems to me that the preference for pale skin and light colors for both eyes and lips is shared (darker colors are often associated with sensualness -- and therefore sexual impudence, a value still much prejudiced against in women --, more advanced age or goth [very different from the Western goth in both culture and cultural significance]), but Koreans seem to be more into sheer, transparent colors with subdued but still obvious glimmers and metalics. Not that the Japanese don't like those, but these qualities seem more exaggerated in Korean products. (In my impression, that is.)
Because Korean mags didn't have a presence until a couple years ago, I don't quite know which ones to go to. I can ask a friend who's studying in Korea for suggestions, though given how little she cares about makeup, I doubt if she'd have offhand knowledge. It'd be great if elianne can provide some help here. : )
Back to the scan thing....
As the beauty mags prove less helpful than I expected, I'm going into fashion ones instead. As mentioned earlier, Japanese fashion magazines generally have irregular practical makeup features, and aside from that, because they're often produced with the objective of providing emulable examples (i.e., can be precisely copied in real life) for their readers, the makeup on the models also reflect what you'd see on the streets, which is useful for our purpose here, except that the faces are often too small for a clear picture, so I'd have to find the ones that are big enough to scan.
While I'm eclectic with my magazine purchases, including fashion ones, I've never paid so much attention to the makeup the models wear. To my surprise, though the looks proposed by each mag are sometimes radically different, the products used and colors preferred seem rather constant across the spectrum, and it's only the manners of application that are different.
To provide a more general overview, I'm using both the horizontal and the vertical approaches; horizontal by providing pictures gleaned from magazines intended for different audiences and aesthetics, and vertical by sampling older issues from the last couple years from my own collection. That way, SN can get a better idea of the current trends and general preferences and also what changes and what doesn't. : )
Oh, and a word on my Japanese -- it's rudimentary (still working on it for manga's sake), but good enough to have a general idea of things.
