With This New App We Can All Be Wide-Eyed, Pale-Skinned Manga Characters

There’s an especially big industry in Asia for beautification apps that can make their female users look slimmer, cuter, wider of eye, paler of skin. Though it’s a bit problematic that those have become the generic ideals in a diverse continent, there’s no end in sight to the fascination with becoming a living manga character. One of the newest on the scene is BeautyPlus, a photo editing app for iPhone made by a Chinese startup.

BeautyPlus also has a web-based editor, but its iPhone app is getting more traction with over one million downloads so far, which is solid progress for a paid app that’s only been around for two months. Lisa Lin from BeautyPlus tells us that the app has shot to the top spot in the App Store’s photo category in Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Macau, Cambodia and a few other countries in Asia. The app’s available in English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Apparently, 90 percent of the BeautyPlus app users are females, which means that there are over 100,000 men somewhere in this world who actually bought this, which is worrying. But, hey, the app does slimming as well, so I might call on the app at some stage to rid me of my beer belly.

BeautyPlus for Android is close to being ready and should be out in late July.

This app’s biggest rival in its home nation is Meitu. It’s China’s best-known female-oriented photo app and has blossomed into such a huge empire that the company even launched its own smartphone that has two 8-megapixel cameras so as to improve the quality of your duckface selfies. But Meitu is focusing on the Chinese market, while BeautyPlus is targeting the whole region.

BeautyPlus is $1.99 in the iOS App Store. Here’s a short demo of the app in action (in Japanese):

(Editing by Enricko Lukman)