For centuries, pointy elven ears were viewed by many as an undesirable beauty flaw — now young people are lining up to get them.
In China, many women are getting dangerous plastic surgery to attain “elf ears.” Most, though, are not striving to look like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legolas or J.K. Rowling’s Dobby. These beauty seekers claim that by enlarging their ears, their faces look slimmer and thus more attractive.
“The results are very obvious,” Song Yao, a clothing store owner from Hangzhou who underwent the surgery, told Vice. “You can see my ears from the front, and overall I look more energetic.”
Song perked up her ears for about 10,000 yuan in part because many Chinese female celebrities were also hyping the trend.
“I only realized that actually many young people, mostly post-2000s, were looking for ways to make ‘elf ears’ after I helped one online celebrity do it at the beginning of last year,” Dr. Yu Wenlin, of the Gaoshang Medical Cosmetic Center in Guangzhou, told the South China Morning Post. “Then more and more people came to me after that.”
The procedure to get these elf ears typically involves injecting hyaluronic acid, which is often used in dermal fillers, into the ears so that they become plump. Others insert a piece of cartilage behind the ear to prop it forward so that they are visible from a frontal face view.
Protruding ears are traditionally considered a symbol of good luck in China, which has helped the elf-ear trend to take over local social media platforms like Weibo, where a Chinese hashtag translating to “elf ears plastic surgery” has attracted over 700 million views. Many videos of users with surgically altered ears have also gone viral on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.
“It is magic! I haven’t changed anything on my face and yet all my friends said I look different the day I got it done. (My face looked smaller, and I looked smarter etc),” one happy patient said of the cosmetic procedure on the Chinese lifestyle sharing platform Xiaohongshu.
However, despite all the newfound popularity, the trend has received a lot of pushback both from social media users and medical professionals. Another viral hashtag on Weibo garnering over 200 million views asks: “What do you think of social appearance anxiety progressing to involve the ears?”
