The New Beauty

In December this year, 124 beauties from around the world will come together at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland for the Miss World pageant. Amongst the pageant winners will be Priyanka Yoshikawa, the 22-year-old, Miss Japan, who is of half Indian, half Japanese lineage. Yoshikawa’s crowning comes just a year after another Miss Universe, Japan, contender Ariana Miyamoto, also of mixed racial background, was bestowed the title. She was half Japanese and half African American. Both title winners received backlash and also earned the moniker of Haafu, ridiculing their half Japanese lineage

As pageants around the world have been associated with traditional ideals of race and beauty, choosing mixed origin pageant queens as representatives of a particular country or culture has often invited criticism in the conformist circles of beauty parades. In 2014, when Indian American Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss USA, she was called everything from a terrorist to an Arab. The fact that a woman of Indian descent was chosen as Miss America did not go down well with those associating the ideal of an American beauty with white skin and blonde hair. Similarly, when Priya Gopal Walker won the Miss Washington Teen USA 2015, contest, she faced a strong blowback because of her “non-American” roots.

Nina Duvului MissAmerica 2014

Nevertheless, multiracial women are becoming increasingly visible on the global stage. In 2015, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, a Filipino German actress representing the Philippines won the Miss Universe title to considerable criticism. The consecutive crowning of two beauty queens with mixed backgrounds in Japan, which is a particularly homogenous country, shows however that multiracial beauties are gaining ground. The Miss Japan pageant director has pushed back against the criticism, arguing that while Priyanka looks different from other Japanese girls, the public chooses modern beauty standards.

Sociologists say the changing modern ideals of beauty are a sign of times. As developed countries in the world become home to large numbers of immigrants, cross-cultural assimilation is bound to happen. According to the American Community Survey, the U.S. immigrant population topped 42.4 million or 13.3 per cent of the entire U.S. population in 2014. In the year ending March 2016, migration to UK exceeded 327,000 according to the latest net migration statistics and in 2015, 271,660, new permanent residents landed in Canada. Japan’s Justice Ministry reported that the number of foreign residents in the country reached an all-time high last year, with 2.23 million long term and permanent foreign residents in the country.

Filmmaker Raj Kaushal who has closely studied cross-cultural influences, says: “Today in big cities such as New York, every fourth face you spot may be an immigrant, and often these people who may not look typically American are in reality as American as it gets. The reality is that we are now living in a very diverse world, where it is unfair to typify anyone based just on their looks.”