Have you ever read book or seen a TV special on strange beauty customs from around the world? Isn’t it just THE best thing to watch/read? I personally love to learn about what is considered beautiful all over the world; it makes you realize that beauty is so relative.
Take for example the geishas’ now obsolete custom of dyeing their teeth black (Ohaguro). A maiko (geisha in training) would dye her teeth black before becoming a full fledged geisha as it was thought that black teeth emphasized the white in their skin and red in their lips.
In Berenice Geoffroy-Schneiter’s book, Geishas, Geishas dyed their teeth black “in order to magnify the brightness of their snow-like complexions.”
This practice dates beyond even the Heian era and was also practiced by commoners (women) and eventually died out during the Meiji era as a result of reforms made to “modernize” (aka Westernize) Japan.
Isn’t that just interesting? East Asian Studies is one of my majors so I’ve been reading up a lot on Medieval Japan and and this is a favourite topic of mine (never seems like schoolwork).
I was perusing news articles on CNN.com earlier and although I don’t stay on any single article for more than 20 seconds (hey, those bulleted points were created for people with internet ADHD like me!) this one in particular really held my full attention: 
