A mother from Japan has urged her nine-year-old daughter to undergo a double eyelid procedure to make her look “beautiful”.
A facial feature many Asian people are born without, double eyelids is the “beauty standard”, mom Rucchi said.
She told VICE TV that as a child, she suffered in misery because she didn’t have them.
“My mother and younger sister have big eyes, while I had a monolid,” she told the program.
“Everyone thought my younger sister was much cuter than me.
“Women in the neighborhood blatantly just called my sister cute and gave her sweets. I’ve never been told anything like that.
“A girl needs double eyelids. I have never seen a girl with monolids who I thought was pretty.”
Despite her age, daughter Micchi is eager to go through the painful surgery.
“If you can endure the pain of plastic surgery, that makes you a beautiful person, in my opinion,” the young girl said.
Micchi added that she wants to have plastic surgery because her eyes are “too narrow” and that it looks like “she is glaring at people”.
Rucchi believes plastic surgery is necessary. She got double eyelid surgery when she turned 18 and wished it had happened earlier.
The mother of five said she didn’t want her daughter to grow up with a complex about her eyes.
“I wanted this procedure to have this kind of positive impact on her,” she said.
“I didn’t want her to grow up with a complex about it, that was my main concern.”
Micchi’s operation, which should have taken 20 minutes, took two hours and the anaesthetic didn’t work either.
Plastic surgery for minors is legal in Japan so long as they have parental consent.
The country is ranked 4th in the world for having the most number of plastic surgery procedures.
Child psychologist Professor Tomohiro Suzuki told VICE about the dangers of children getting plastic surgery and that people can become “trapped in a loop”.
“You might have a more ambiguous idea of your ideal image,” he said.
“So even if you have plastic surgery done to get closer to your ideal image, that image might change again over time and you’ll need surgery again to get you closer to that new image.”