To my friends’ utter dismay, I’ve recently been mulling over whether going under the knife to get me some beautiful eyelids is worth the pain. Beauty is pain. Beauty is pain.

Also known as Asian upper blepharoplasty, double eyelid surgery is basically a small incision made along the top eyelid to create a natural crease.

Before you say it- no, it’s not so my eyelids will finally resemble the very beautifully creased eyelids of a Caucasian person. Nor would this surgery be to please da boiz/my male fans/admirers (there are countless). It is first and foremost about convenience.

My eyelids are… Let’s call them sisters, not twins. Perhaps distant relatives.

My left has my dream crease, but only sometimes makes an appearance when it wants to party. Most of the time it’s as lazy as me on a Saturday night and lays low, aka the crease inconveniently disappears.

The right eyelid? Well, it’s a fleshy mess in there. A whole lot of eye meat and no crease to balance it out- THE WORST. Although my friends don’t notice, when I look in the mirror I see one eye that’s wide awake and the other way that’s fast asleep.

The difference. Image via Annabelle Lee.

So, you can imagine the shock on their faces when I casually mentioned my current contemplation.

“Are you CRAZY?!”

“Don’t be silly, Annabelle!”

And those are just a selection of their very dramatic responses.

Oh sorry, I didn’t realise I was being SILLY.

In that case, you’re right. I’ll flush my thoughts, insecurities and research straight down the toilet. But to be fair, they had no idea what double eyelid surgery was and how it relieved an ever-present struggle for many women and men.

So, I began the following explanation:

It’s a full-blown thing in Korea.

We follow so many Korean beauty trends; why not add this one to the list?

Surprisingly, South Korea performs the highest number of plastic surgeries in the world, and the popularity of this surgery in Korea can be attributed to their number one beauty ideal: having big eyes. The bigger the better, actually.

This beauty mantra has been reinforced by countless Korean celebrities and has consequently become all the rage among your regular Korean girl or boy.

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Celebrities who regret their plastic surgery.

JENNIFER GREY DIRTY DANCING

Note: This is not why I find double eyelid surgery so appealing. In actual fact, it’s because…

Right now, applying eye makeup on myself is really hard.

As a makeup lover and winged eyeliner fanatic, symmetry is all that I ask for, yet symmetry I have not been blessed with. We all endure the struggles of perfecting one eye’s wing, then completely messing up the other. Well for me and my uneven eyelids, that difficulty is multiplied by 1,000,000 (you know what? I’m not even exaggerating).

Trying to apply winged eyeliner onto a droopy mono-lid is like trying to wade through a bushy forest with no sense of direction or destination in mind.

Extra lid/bushy forest just keeps intercepting the task at hand, and the only solution is to dramatically fall onto your knees while shaking your hands in the air. Stress does weird things to me.

Okay okay, a slight hyperbole - the main problem I regularly face is dealing with two different eyelid situations.

In all honesty, I would rather have two mono lids than my current uneven state, because CONSISTENCY, PEOPLE.

I’d be happy to wade through bush twice, so I can get used to it and remedy any accompanying issues.

But handling a double eyelid first, then a mono eyelid is like spending a weekend at a pamper filled, spa galore in Hawaii, then immediately being dumped into thisstupid bushy forest.

(Confused about whether we’re talking about eyelids or bushy forests? Same.)

Alternatives.

Alternatives are called alternatives for a reason: they're not the real deal. Alternatives to getting the legitimate double eyelid surgery include eyelid tape and eyelid glue.

Michelle Phan uploaded a YouTube video back in 2012 about how she magically created her double eyelids without surgery by th