Now that we’ve all finished constructing our memorial altars for The Toast (mine is made out of light rye, maple butter, and tears), it’s time to look at a few more makeup trends through the ages. Normally these pieces focus on a large period of time and what was happening worldwide(-ish; I only have so much space to write about things before Nikki sends me a cease-and-desist), but this column is going to zoom-focus on Japan’s brief stint as the home of ganguro (hiragana: がんぐろ, katakana: ガングロ) and manba makeup and fashion.
The history and stories around this look (and its variations) are cloudy, rife with issues, and absolutely caked with fake tanner and white greasepaint. If you tended to hang around various corners of the internet back in the day (by which I mean the early-to-mid-2000s, a simpler time when bloggers meant “people who wrote about their crushes on Livejournal” and you’d rush home from school to go chat on MSN with the same people you just spent eight hours with), then you might have stumbled across photographs women in ganguro or manba makeup and dress, as it was an “extreme” subculture that lent itself easily to gawking and poorly formatted blog posts.
Goths have dark lipstick, cholas have lip liner, preppies (mid-2000s teens represent! Yeah, more like ABERCROMBIE AND BITCH, oh man, I’m going to have the best Deadjournal name ever) have their shiny light blue eyeshadows, and ganguro girls have…kind of everything, really, including a convoluted history and massive streaks of bronzer. Before we get into what constitutes a ganguro look, we first need to take a step waaaay back to the 1990s, a time when many North American fashionistas decided that everything needed to be some shade of brown (SIDE NOTE: A great example of this is 60-70% of Elaine’s wardrobe on Seinfeld. Seriously, there is so much brown). Ganguro is a smaller subsection of the wider gyaru (ギャル) subculture, which is the umbrella group for a number of similar styles and variations, along with being a style as well. Gyaru style first came to prominence in the early 1990s in the Shibuya district of Tokyo: high school-aged girls would dye their hair, wear short skirts, tan their skin, and haul around luxury bags like some sort of early Lindsay Lohan. Gals/gyaru were seen as easygoing party girls (with high school practitioners of the style referred to as kogyaru, or “little gals”), and there is a great breakdown of the early evolution of gyaru style, the moral panic surrounding it, and other cultural factors here. For now I’m going to wave my hands in a glittery circle to make time jump forward so we can get to ganguro and the extreme ends of gyaru.
To put it (painfully) basically, gyaru trends started as a teenage rebellion in the face of traditional ideals of beauty, popping up around Shibuya (the area around Shibuya station is a hotspot for fashion and shopping, with the main space for gyaru fashion being the Shibuya 109 building), which quickly launched a moralistic freakout, thanks to the more immodest style of dress, a lot of sensationalism, and – interestingly — the changing view of school uniforms (from boring to fashionable to – again, multi-dicked Darwinian monstrosity – sexualized). As with any subculture that attracts a majority of teenagers, gyaru styles resulted in a lot of pearl-clutching and “Oh my god, where did we go wrong? Also, how did you get 11 tanning salon membership cards? How does that even work?”
Variations include yamanba/manba (or yamauba, 山姥), which is the darker, slightly more turned up version of ganguro (with the two looks being presented as kind of interchangeable on the internet most of the time). Fun fact: The name yamanba comes from a type of yōkai (mountain hag or witch) that appears as an evil old woman with long, matted, golden-white hair hiding a second mouth and possibly bobby pins. It’s perfect for the person in your life who is into both hanging out at the beach and devouring helpless travellers.
The original gyaru style made way for the more extreme versions of the original tanned schoolgirl, eventually becoming the early internet-friendly ganguro and manba fashions. The basic ganguro (and especially yamanba/manba) look is: dark, tanned skin; white concealer or pan stick around the eyes, paired with black eyeliner and eye shadow; fake lashes, face stickers, and/or circle lenses; and light-coloured lipstick. Tanned skin was a must for this look. Whether from tanning beds or fake tanner or dark foundation, the goal was to achieve a deep, ultra-tanned look that ignored the idea of bihaku (a term created by marketers that means “beautifully white”). While the early gyaru girls tended to have more natural tans, the ganguro tans were darkened considerably, with manba/yamanba being darker than ganguro and some women going so dark that they were referred to as gonguro.
Like any subculture that involves shucking off society’s standards and going, “Screw you, Mom, I’m going to pierce my face using an apple and a sewing needle and there’s NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT,” ganguro girls (and related groups) were viewed as a type of “bad girl” — seen as being “rough” or “easy” – and during the transition from early gyaru to ganguro and other similar trends, a definite class divide showed up within the subculture itself. I spoke briefly to Nicole of The Beauty Maniac in Tokyo, a Japanese beauty blogger living in Tokyo, about ganguro, and she noted: “Even when Ganguro was on trend, people judged those girls as poorly educated young girls who have no common sense. […] Ganguro and Yamanba are not just [about] makeup or how they dress, it’s about their attitude as well.”
The question that tends to linger around ganguro like fake tanner stains on new sheets is does this look constitute some sort of blackface? Ganguro itself translates to “black face,” and the look has been accused of being caused by teen girls’ obsession with black American hip hop and R&B artists. Japan has a problematic history when it comes to the representation of black people in society and pop culture (with popular bands posing in blackface as recently as 2015 and Little Black Sambo making an appearance in children’s books in 2005), although there is a much deeper discussion that can be had about that (what does blackface represent in Japanese media vs. American media, etc.?). There are other factors at play as well: A major inspiration for the look was pulled from West Coast styles, taking the floral patterns, tans, and beachy look of California and then ramping them up to 1000. Again, the look is also a heavy backlash against the “traditional” ideal of Japanese beauty — i.e., light skin, dark hair, and a subtle look.
One troubling point is part of the supposed inspiration for this style: Adamo-chan. A character played by Japanese comedian Toshiro Shimazaki, Adamo-chan is a tanned, white-lipped, curly-wigged character described as an “aboriginal.” There are some claims that the early yanba or ganguro girls were inspired by Adamo-chan’s look, so do with that what you will. It’s a style that clearly has cloudy, sometimes uncomfortable roots (inspired by surfers and Baywatch? Sure! Inspired by a racist depiction of a Pacific Islander? [TINA BELCHER GROANING NOISE]), and it has inspired other offshoots such as b-gyaru and rasuta (Rasta) style. In short, there is a LOT of discussion to be had around the roles of racism, class, rebellion, and sexuality in this trend. For now, I’m going to focus on the look itself, but if you have any questions or thoughts, I’ll see you in the comments.
Another distinctive part of the look is the streak of white up the bridge of the nose using white makeup or concealer, sort of like one of those Instagram contouring tutorials, minus the part where they spent 28 minutes blending the ever-loving shit out of it. Depending on the height of the makeup, this would sometimes signal whether the look was yamanba (in which the stripe of white goes higher than the eyebrows) or manba (in which the stripe of white is lower than the brow line), although both looks were basically the same apart from that. With a big part of the inspiration for the look coming from surf fashions and shows like Baywatch, the white streak was sometimes seen as a sort of homage to a line of sunscreen or zinc up the bridge of the nose. White lipstick was then applied to make the lips stand out starkly against the deeply tanned skin. Along with the makeup, there’s also the hair – big, teased, long, straight (or wavy) with curled ends, and either bleached white or brightly coloured. Jam a flower in there, and you’re off to the races.
For the eyes, ganguro basically has two colours: white and black. You want other colours? Buzz off. This look is all white and black, all the time. White eye shadow, greasepaint, or other cream products would be painted around the eyes, from brow bone to underneath the bottom lid, then blended out around the edges and topped with pearl powder, glitter, or setting powder to keep things from smearing. While the outfits and hair for this look may be colourful, the main eye shadow and eyeliner colour is black (with the occasional pop of colour thrown in), with eye shadow applied to the whole lid and eyes lined both top and bottom. Large, over-the-top fake lashes were also a mainstay, with them sometimes being worn on both the top and bottom lash line. To make the eyes look bigger, eyeliner would occasionally be drawn far under the eye, with lashes either drawn on underneath or fake lashes applied below the actual lower lash line. Another option was to use small stickers on gems on the face, just below the eyes, as decoration. For a quick look a some women in manba looks, you can watch this (problematic!) video that has everything from the host poking through people’s wallets and talking about their thongs to OH GIRL DON’T USE A PAINT MARKER AS EYE MAKEUP, that makes my eyes water just watching it.
Trends come and trends go, and ganguro and certain other parts of gyaru trends have waned in the last ten years. egg magazine – one of the main voices for gyaru and ganguro fashion and, I assume, excellent egg-related recipes? – shuttered in 2014. The fascination with ganguro made way for the fascination with Harajuku fashion, allowing a new generation of people to stare at young Japanese women and write articles about Gwen Stefani’s questionable actions and never-changing face (I honestly think she is Dorian Gray. Prove me wrong, Gwen). The most extreme form of ganguro/yamanba styles faded out around 2004/2005, with ganguro being replaced by the slightly (slightly) more toned-down kuro gyaru (“black skin gals,” with Black Diamond/Gal Unit being the most well-known gal group) and shiro gyaru (“white skin gals,” which is the same style but no tan), and eventually fading away almost entirely.
While a ganguro café opened in Shibuya in 2015, the style appears to have disappeared to all but the fringes. Nicole of The Beauty Maniac in Tokyo said that while “gyaru/ganguro makeup was HUGE” when she was in high school, more than 15 years ago, “nowadays it’s hard to find ganguro girls in Tokyo, even in Shibuya or Harajuku, where those girls were hanging out.” But hey, what goes around comes around, and I’m sure that the kids of 2090 will be getting weird email forwards sent directly to their eyeballs with titles like “Can you BELIEVE this girl’s tan and nano hair? OMG what a vintage look.”
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SOURCES:
Neojapanisme – The History of Gyaru
Featured image via Wikipedia
Thank you for this super thorough look at ganguro (and related looks!) I first learned about it reading Peach Girl oh so many years ago, and though Momo wasn’t technically ganguro, people definitely speculated about it and it opened a whole world of Japanese street fashion to me that WASN’T just EGL.
Also, my deadjournal name was objectively the best (goldenqueen) so FIGHT ME
YEAH BRING IT (I was actually more of a LJ user but I totally wrote about all my feelings YEAH BRING IT AND BY IT I MEAN TISSUES).
It’s funny because ganguro is both a blanket term (sort of) and also just a subset of a larger group with like… 400 variations? It’s like when people are like “I’m a casual/cyber/etc etc type goth” or whatever, there’s one giant term that gets applied to everyone (mostly by those outside the group) and then a million little variations within it.
Wait, back to JL/DJ fights YEAH I’M GOING TO GO POST A QUIZ, TURNS OUT I’M A RAVENCLAW JERKS.
oh friend I still use my LJ, I’m one of those weird Internet People(tm) that just can’t give it up ahaha.
You definitely see it in the “goth” spectrum here (pastel goth represent, I guess) with little niche things here and there.
Also, FRUiTS. God, I pored over that thing as a freshman/sophomore in high school and wanted so desperately to look COOL like that but when you’re living the Fashion Bug life you can’t really make it work.
ps I hope you don’t mind but I am now following you on Twitter, because you are awesome.
I am always up for more people to read my awesome ramblings on Twitter (aka “DUMB IDEAS FOR BAND NAMES: San Helligrino”, etc).
I was always much more of a gross punk kid (so much homemade clothing, so many shows in weird halls), but I would always read up on all the super intense subcultures (or at least read what I could in those early days) because my hometown was so monotone. FRUiTs, though. Oh man, I still want to wear like, a fair amount of the stuff posted on their instagram, haha.
I tried so earnestly to turn the mom jeans from Fashion Bug into something TRULY PUNK (I didn’t embrace my gothiness until fairly recently, and punk was more my scene, ask me about north Jersey VFW halls) but I was always a closet weeb that wanted to get away with even a fraction of what the street fashion books showed us. Fishnets! Lace! Dour looking individuals! It was a dream that I approach more and more as I get older. I’d be an EGL granny if I could afford those cords.
You had me at “dour looking individuals.”
OH MAN. As an EGL Granny ™ it’s possible to afford Lolita on a smaller budget. It just takes a lot of time and research–there are TONS and TONS of Chinese companies making good stuff inexpensively (you have to go through a shopping service but it’s really not that bad), plus facebook communities for secondhand sales (which is where most of mine came from).
I mean, it’s still not usually really genuinely cheap, not if your basis for comparison is Target or Forever 21. But if you’re not obsessed with having the newest print, it’s totally do-able.
I’m a cosplayer, so I’m familiar with exorbitant costs ahaha. I’m also plus size, so that screws things up a liiiiittle bit. 🙁
God, and the cut-off for “plus size” is so much smaller than normal clothes.
The options are getting better, I know one of the Korean brands (Hanueli?) makes plus sizes, and so does Bodyline, and some of the Chinese brands do custom sizing, and I know that one of my Innocent World dresses also fits one of my friends who is much bigger than I am. And one of the facebook sales groups is specifically for plus sizes.
Also heyoooo I cosplay too. I’ve been putting together a character from Steven Universe for the last couple of months, spread out over many paychecks, and I’m ….trying not to add it up.
I should spend more time on LJ, see who’s still active.
*cough* clevermanka has the same username over there *cough*
Aaaand added under the “angry feminists” filter.
oh me! I’m there sporadically under dancing-crow – I would love to see more people come back…
I may or may not still have a journal so I’m very pleased that you’re one of *those* Weird Internet people.
Weird Internet People (aka LJers) unite!
I would LOVE a Toast community. I know I keep talking about it, but I am so lazy and have yet to make it.
If there are enough of us, this would be AWESOME and I’d be 100% on board.
I’m more a DW user than an LJ user these days, but I do still crosspost and check my LJ friendslist every so often, and I would be TOTALLY up for this.
So glad you did this article! I remember reading about ganguro on… I think it was The Fashion Police on Something Awful wayyy way back in the days of the internet. Like you said– badly formatted posts to gawk at. It’s great to read a better researched article that puts the look in social context. Well done! (Also, not going to wear ganguro makeup ever for a variety of reasons, but now that we’ve moved past contouring and into strobing, can I just declare “shaping your face with a million tiny stickers” to be the next makeup trend? Hit me up, beauty vloggers!)
I’d love to read about how teen rebellion in Japan moved from Ivy Prep to California coastal, and the major vectors through which those looks were transmitted and filtered.
can I just declare “shaping your face with a million tiny stickers” to be the next makeup trend?
I just have to share that covering one’s face with stickers (“patches” or “beauty marks”) were a Georgian Era trend.
PATCHES may be reduced to NINE sorts, which ought to be placed in the following manner:..
3. The gay, on the brink of the dimple formed by a smile
*slaps stickers on cheek* oh hey people of all genders 😉 😉 😉
ETA: thank you so much for posting it, now I’m laughing at how 8 of 9 sorts are character traits and then the 9th is “oh I have a pimple”
Lol! I’m not sure how legit it is because it basically sounds like a guy mansplaining to women how he’d like them to indicate they’re interested in him, but no matter what it’s pretty freaking hilarious. I get the sense that the patches were originally used to cover up blemishes, but after enough popular people wore them they became fashion statements in their own rights. I heard about them from a Regency romance where the heroine wanted to look as vulgar as possible, which basically meant taking the previous era’s fashions and turning them up to 11.
If it was ok for me to put stickers over my zits, I totally would.
They make zit stickers, but they’re meant to absorb the gross stuff and keep you from picking at it. They don’t hide it at all. I never wear them out of the house.
I know, right? “Uggggghhhhh I as a man hate this fashion but if I can’t STOP you from doing it then at LEAST you should do it according to these rules that I may or may not have made up??”
(I mean, it says “lay down” rules, not “relate” or “explain”, so it sounds like he just made them up himself?)
I tried this but I probably should have used giant butterflies instead of tiny sparkles, I don’t think it’s a bold enough look otherwise.
I used stick-on rhinestones at the outer corners of my eyes, oh god.
I did inner corners.
Oooh, fancy.
There is actually a book that (kind of) explains that! It’s called (ugh) Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno, and it traces all the different rebellious teen styles over the last 50 years in Japan. Really interesting!
Link here :https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Schoolgirl-Inferno-Subculture-Handbook/dp/0811856909?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Hey, “Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno” is the name of my prog-rock slash alt-metal j-pop cover band.
I think contouring with stickers would be the best. We’d all look like Lichtenstein paintings!
As a current gyaru (but never a ganguro gal), I kind of miss vintage beachy styles. Like, GYDA has great beachy wear, but seeing the pictures of all these girls in cocolulu makes me nostalgic. (…even though I look awkward in florals.)
The early/mid-2000s was this wonderful world of floral prints and buttloads of colour and I mean, as someone who is perfectly happy to languish in the world of “retired goth/failed grunge” style, I’m not personally longing for the days where I would layer a bright green polo shirt over a hot pink shirt, but there are days were I miss the sunny optimism of the look.
Uuuugh looks like the image didn’t take. Here it is with butterflies:
Ugh sorry about the giant picture, I will never try to bring back Georgian-era fashion again
The Georgian spirit is strong in you!
BUTTERFLIES EVERYWHERE
<3 <3 <3 thank you!!!
This is amazing, I love it and will miss your fantastic pieces in the post-Toast era. [My Toast altar, FWIW, is composed of three pieces of buttered homemade wheat, lightly browned, with a heap of fresh raspberries on top, and honey drizzled over all.]
BTW, a book by Philomena Keet coming out in August of 2016 called Tokyo Fashion City has a really nice overview of gyaru culture and fashion). Link <a href=”https://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Fashion-City-Trendiest-Districts/dp/4805313390?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0″>here if you’re interested…also contains good overviews of fashion by neighborhood, including history.
My only hope is that someone out there is like, “The world needs more of this weird stuff” and bring me on to write more weird things. COME ON, WORLD.
Also, your altar sounds delicious. I need it on my desk tomorrow morning, toast-haste. Hah! I made a funny but seriously, toast.
Things sure brings me back. My first of many trips to Japan, summer of 2001, just out of high school. Ganguro was just starting to really become a thing, and I remember my first trip to Harajuku being a whirlwind of self-tanner and sparkles. There were discarded face stickers everywhere, and since Japanese streets are usually so clean it was really noticeable. I do love thought that every time I go back, there is a cool new style hanging out in Yoyogi Park. In early 2008 it was the tail end of Lolita, and in the summer of 2009 I passed a huge group of greaser dudes with ridiculously huge coifs of hair and leather jackets. I’m going back in fall and I can’t wait to see what’s new.
Lolita is still happening, trust me.
So are the greaser dudes, they have a club. It’s great. Pompadours for days.
Do you plan on writing more regarding truly fascinating makeup trends elsewhere after the Toast closes? So…uh…..OTHER PEOPLE….can follow you obsessively?
I’m trying to find a place. SOMEONE TAKE ME WITH YOU. THE WORLD NEEDS ME TO YELL ABOUT MAKEUP or something along those lines.
As someone who is/was involved (online, long before I had any of the clothes) in Lolita, what was fascinating to me was which trends crossed over–namely, the false eyelashes (though much less exaggerated) and circle lenses are still really popular in Lolita, and some sweet lolitas do a few rhinestone stickers near their eyes or on their cheekbones.
What an awesome article! I lived in Japan from 89-93 (although in the “backwaters” of Hiroshima) and went to college there in 2000. I was a lot more courageous with my hair/makeup when I lived there than anything I would’ve tried in the US! I admire the whole concept of gyaru and how the women used their style in response to social issues. Did anyone else watch Bounce Ko Girls?
I don’t know the first thing about makeup so these pieces are really fascinating to me and make me wish I could do interesting things with makeup. I’m going to miss these a lot.
I was a teenager in the 00s so I remember really well all the mockery around this style/these styles. I had no idea there was actually so much depth to them (even beyond whether it’s racist), so I’m really glad for this post and those essays you linked! I especially appreciate how it was (at least in part) a way to fend off creepy older guys.
Hmm. Having loved for a good long while in Japan and having hung out with kids loke this as well as older fashion/art people from Japan who are bilingual (and thusly a bit more appropriate to report on this subculture) I noticed a few points were either overlooked or downplayed.
First, in Japanese languate the word for dark or black is used in the same context. You are “kuro” if you are tan, or dark complected. It is comparable to how variations of the word “black” in Latin languages sound very close to “negro” but of course when we translate those languages we look at the context and find the more appropriate equivalent.
Second, a major origin of Gyaru fashion was the popularity of super dark tanskin via surfing, so surf culture (bleached blond hair, super tan skin, “panda” look due to wearing sunglasses all day). A lot of gyaru fashion inckudes Hawaiian shirts, leis, etc. One could even argue that the mainland urban teens were “appropriating” the more exotic culture of Okinawa and Shikoku beach types.
So I think that while of course in a different cultural context some Japanese kid wearing super dark make-up is totally awful, it is plain wrong to assume that all gyaru style references black American or African stereotypes. Different reference point entirely. (In fact, that would be a totally different type of Japanese girl, the girl who loves 90s style and fashion – doorknocker earrings, cornrows, Afro permed hair – & probably dates black or African expats, or did when she lived abroad.)
The mention of the Aboriginal character touches on a different topic entirely (which could be better addressed separately to this kind of discussion) including the Dutch-inspired candies that prominently feature minstrel-looking caricatures (Sambo is the name of a cookie brand sold in Japan but probably elsewhere in Europe with minstrel faces). But I think it isn’t relevant to a topic discussing gyaru subculture.
Thank you for confirming the “black = tan = dark” thing. Chinese does that, too, but I wasn’t sure it had carried over to Japanese.
Would the Aboriginal character be more likely to be an Ainu from Hokkaido? They have curley hair, and are darker (possibly because so many are farmers and work outdoors)than mainstream Japanese.
They have also been much oppressed, including the banning in the early 20th century of lip tattoos for women. Actually upper lip, sort of a tattooed handlebar mustache. Sorry this lady is not tattooed. Those cards sold fast. (My account) http://www.ebay.ca/itm/POSTCARD-JAPAN-Ainu-munner…