Okay. So far we’ve talked about toilets, the arts and the language. What’s next? Fashion!!

Today we’ll take a look at the infamous Ganguro style! It was a fashion popular with Japanese girls in the ’90s.

A Ganguro girl would fake bake her way to extremely tan skin year round. (Usually an attractive shade of pumpkin color, and might I add: skin cancer by age 30?) Next they would bleach their hair to a blonde/orange/silver color. (Perfect match with the orange-ish skin.) Some of the girls would buy blue colored contacts, and to finish this eye catching look a Ganguro girl would wear pastel eye shadow, silver pink lipstick and plastic sticky jewels on her face. The amount of make up varied from girl to girl, depending how devote they were to the style. The extremists would wear the make up almost like face paint. (Looking at them you could mistake them as a Broadway actress in costume or some sort of tanned clown.)

In addition to their interesting facial make up, these girls often wore bright colors, platform shoes and a lot of rings and bracelets. They also used a lot of slang and were generally portrayed negatively by the media. (Many Japanese books have the main female character picked on by clownish looking Ganguro girls.)

The Ganguro girls were generally fans of hip hop and attracted attention to themselves (because really who could miss a fake baked clown sitting next to them?) because they thought it was the ultimate way of self expression. They adopted this fashion for the attention. This style is now rarely seen and has been replaced with the “Goth Lolita” look, which we’ll examine later.

This is probably the only picture on the internet where a Japanese girl is not doing the traditional “V” or peace sign pose.