At just 27 years old, Li Jiaqi is already one of the most successful online personalities in China. He specializes in selling makeup, particularly luxury brand lipsticks, which has earned him crazy nicknames “King of Lipstick” or “Iron Lips”.

With over 40 million fans on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, and millions others on various other social networks, Li Jiaqi is perhaps the most sought after beauty vlogger in all of China. Whatever product he chooses to promote turns into an instant hit, and companies are desperate to work with him, but he remains mostly focused on makeup, lipstick in particular. It’s not really the kind of career you would expect a young man to venture into, especially in a traditionalist country like China, but his success is proof that unconventionality can be an advantage. That’s how Li Jiaqi looks at it, anyway. He says that most people doubted him at first, saying that he could never sell to a female audience, but he had always been confident that he had an advantage over female beauty vloggers – stamina.

Read More »

Last month, South Korean television featured the bizarre case of a shoe repairman from Seoul who has been conditioning his body by banging his body and his head against a tree for the last five years.

Would you ever pick on a man after seeing him violently banging his forehead against a full-grown tree trunk? I myself would, steer away immediately, which is just what the hero of our story is betting on. Back in April, South Korean TV show X SBS WOW featured a shoe repairman from Seoul’s Sinchon neighborhood famous for banging his head and body against a tree every day. You’d think they had made up such a preposterous story, but this man has the forehead callus to prove that he has been doing a lot of head banging for quite some time.

Read More »

Looking at photos of Chinese cosplayer CROME拉面猫就是星空萌 dressed up as some of the most famous anime heroines, you would never guess that the person under all that makeup and female clothes is a man.

A former art teacher, CROME拉面猫就是星空萌 now works as a full-time cosplayer, regularly posting new photos and updates for his legion of online fans, attending events and working on new costumes. He reportedly started trying on women’s clothes in secret, in 2007; it was nothing fancy, he didn’t experiment with makeup at the time, and he didn’t tell anyone about it, but he considers those days the true beginning of his female cosplaying career. It wasn’t until 2012 that he was comfortable enough to go out in public dressed as one of his favorite anime characters.

Read More »

A Chinese woman claims she has had to use a strip of tape to sleep at night after botched double eyelid surgery left her unable to completely close her eyes.

The woman, referred to by Chinese media only as Ms. Ma, reportedly paid 20,000 yuan ($2,800) for a double eyelid surgery at the Jimei Plastic Hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in September of 2018. The cosmetic procedure artificially creates the Western style creases on the upper eyelids, and is very popular among Asian women who don’t naturally have them. Unfortunately, in Ms. Ma’s case, the procedure didn’t turn out as well as she expected it to, so she went under the knife for second time, only to have this procedure turn out even worse than before. The woman was shocked to realize that she was no longer unable to close her eyes completely.

Read More »

A Chinese man who spent seven months away from his apartment in Langfang, Hebei Province, recently returned to find his home had transformed into a small botanical garden.

The unnamed man took to social media to share videos and photos of what he found when he entered his home, after being away for almost seven months, since before the Covid-19 crisis. You can see vines lining the walls of the apartment, using hanging photos, the TV set and furniture as supports to advance further into the home, and even some stems hanging from the roof. The video of this small botanical garden quickly went viral, leaving many social media users wondering how the plants grew so much without him to look after them. It seems the man’s brother had a part to play as well.

Read More »

An elderly couple from China’s Henan province took legal action against their own son for neglecting his duty of financially supporting them.

Filial piety isn’t that important of a notion in the Western world, but in China it’s a big deal. Failing to take care of your elderly parents is actually considered a legal offense both in China and in other countries with large Chinese communities, like Singapore or Taiwan. It’s actually not uncommon for parents to sue their offspring for neglecting them in their old age, and while most reconcile their differences before having punitive measures enforced, some don’t and police, revenue service and banks have to get involved. Such was the case of an elderly couple whose son flat out refused to support them even after being ordered to by a judge.

Read More »

South Korean media recently reported the disturbing case of a high-school teacher who scolded and humiliated a student in front of the class, causing him to take his life that same day.

On April 26th, 2020 ethics professor at Youngshin Middle School in Pohang City referred to only as “A”, for personal privacy reasons, was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to 10 months in prison and had his teaching license suspended for 5 years. His crime: shaming a 9th grade student in front of the whole class after catching him reading a light manga novel, and causing him to end his own life, because of the humiliation. The teacher’s sentencing sent shock waves through South Korean social media, with some users accusing the teacher of bullying, and other expressing fears that the case set a precedent that will put fear into other teachers, preventing them from being strict when they need to be.

Read More »

In a bid to make its exotic fish tank more appealing to visitors, an aquarium in the Chinese city of Guizhou wrote popular Chinese surnames on the live fish, attracting the wrong kind of attention in the process.

Staff at the Guizhou Polar Ocean World thought they had struck gold when they came up with the idea of writing common surnames like “Zhao,” “Hu” or “Wu” on dozens of live fish in an exotic fish tank, but the response wasn’t as positive as they had hoped. Photos and videos of the yellow fish with bright red Chinese characters painted on their bodies quickly went viral on social media and inspiring thousands of critical comments from the general public.

Overwhelmed by the negative feedback, the Guizhou Polar Ocean World recently put out a statement saying that their exotic fish tank was generally overlooked by most visitors, and that the painted surnames were supposed to make the fish more appealing to the public.

Read More »

China’s cosmetic surgery market was estimated to be worth around $31 billion in 2018, with double digit growth per year, and at the forefront of it is a 30-year-old self-confessed cosmetic procedure addict who had her first work done when she was only 14.

Wu Xiaochen, or Abby, as she is known on social media, is perhaps China’s most popular plastic surgery crusader. Her perfect features fascinate and inspire millions of young women who either dream of making it in the competitive entertainment industry, or simply want to correct certain defects so they can regain their self-esteem. She has millions of followers on various social media platforms, owns two cosmetic surgery clinics in Beijing and has worked with some of the biggest brands in China. But Abby’s success didn’t happen overnight. She has been obsessed with plastic surgery for the past 16 years, and has gone under the knife or the needle hundreds of times during that time to make sure that her appearance is impeccable.

Read More »

A 24-year-old Indian man was recently hospitalized after he allegedly cut off his tongue as an offering to the Hindu goddess Kali Mata, to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

From putting quarantine offenders in haunted houses to people locking spouses in the bathroom, we’ve seen people do some pretty extreme things to stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Vivek Sharma, a young stone sculptor working in Suigam, India’s Gujarat state, takes the cake. Frustrated about not being able to return to his home town in Madhya Pradesh, because of nationwide lockdowns, Sharma reportedly chopped off his own tongue at a temple, as an offering to Hindu goddess Kali Mata, to stop the spread of the virus. So far his sacrifice has proven to be in vain…

Read More »

Remember those bra-cup face mask memes doing the rounds on social media not too long ago? Well, a Japanese company decided to make them a reality, and they sold out almost instantly.

Getting your hands on a proper medicinal face mask in Japan is pretty hard these days, but clothing companies around the country are trying to alleviate the shortage by producing reusable cloth masks. Atsumi Fashion, an apparel manufacturer in the city of Himi, Toyama Prefecture, is one such company, only it’s going about things a bit differently. You see, Atsumi specializes in women’s underwear garments, and its management decided that applying the same design to face masks wouldn’t be such a bad idea. They were right!

Read More »

Fed up with people constantly neglecting self-isolation and quarantine rules, a local politician on Indonesia’s Java Island decided to lock rule breakers in a haunted house to set an example for others.

Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati, the head of Sragen regency came up with the idea of taping into the locals’ fear of ghosts as a way to deal with an influx of newcomers in the area. Because of lockdowns in the capital Jakarta and other major cities, Sragen has started seeing quite a lot of people coming in, many of whom completely disregard the rule to self-isolate themselves for 14 days, in case they are infected with the novel coronavirus. To make sure people started respecting the rules, Kusdinar started putting offenders in abandoned houses locals believe are haunted.

Read More »

Chinese media recently reported the case of two doctors who got infected with the novel coronavirus while treating patients and suffered a drastic change in skin pigmentation, going from white to dark brown.

Dr. Yi Fan and Dr. Hu Weifeng, both 42, became infected with the coronavirus in January, while treating patients at the Wuhan Central Hospital. They were colleagues of Dr. Li Wenliang, the late whistle-blower who first sounded the alarm about the dangerous new virus and was originally reprimanded by the Chinese Government. They both would have shared his tragic fate too, if not for the valiant efforts of their fellow doctors to keep them alive. The two doctors spent more than a month on life-support and only regained consciousness this month, when they also learned that their appearances had changed drastically…

Read More »

Honey, dubbed by activists and animal lovers ‘the world’s loneliest dolphin’, died last month, after almost two years spent by herself in a small pool at an abandoned aquarium in Japan.

We originally featured Honey’s tragic story back in October 2018, when footage shot by Japanese animal rights activists showing a single bottlenose dolphin floating in what appeared like an abandoned pool went viral online. It turned out that the video had been shot with a drone at the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, months after it had closed down. The dolphin, named Honey, and some penguins had remained behind and were being fed by an employee every few days. Still, the dolphin suffered from skin burns under the hot summer sun, as well as stress and loneliness. The story made international headlines at the time, but that did nothing to change Honey’s fate. After almost two years spent in that pool alone, she died last month…

Read More »

A Vietnamese social media influencer and minor TV personality claims to has suffered severe muscle atrophy in one of her legs after getting filler injections to remove mosquito bite marks.

Instagram “hot girl” Mai Sương recently took to the internet to denounce a beauty salon for having caused her serious harm by injecting Botox filler into her leg to supposedly help remove bruise-like mosquito bites. The young influencer told her Instagram followers that she had started noticing the skin color changing to blue, then concave gaps forming around the injected mosquito bite mark, and finally one of the legs becoming weaker than the other. Concerned about her health, Mai went to the hospital and was shocked to learn that she was suffering from severe muscle atrophy because of the filler injections.

Read More »