It’s official, this real-life anime trend has gotten completely out of hand. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t stumble upon some photos of girls going to any lengths in order to look like real live anime characters. Today’s example, Anastasiya Shpagina, an Ukrainian girl who has even taken a Japanese name – Fukkacumi. Not the most inspired choice, I must say…
Just last Friday I wrote an article about a rather creepy-looking Chinese model called Tina Leopard, who had the pointiest chin I’d ever seen and had risen to Internet fame thanks to her anime-like appearance. I had discovered there was actually a trend sweeping China, with thousands of Chinese teens posting photos of themselves with anime-style makeup and hairstyles, but apparently it’s not just China that’s affected by this bizarre fashion. Venus Angelic, a young Londoner who made headlines in international media for her YouTube videos where she talks and makes herself look like a living Japanese doll, and Dakota Rose(aka Kotakoti) from America, were also praised for their genuine anime looks, and now the trend has apparently hit Eastern Europe as well. After Valeria Lukyanova sparked controversy in Ukrainian and Russian media with her doll-like features a few months back, it’s Anastasiya Shpagina’s turn to baffle us with her realistic anime-like looks. Coincidentally, she’s from the same town as Valeria, Odessa.
19-year-old Anastasiya (Nastya) Shpagina has been called “the new Barbie” by national news outlets, but she later revealed she’s striving to become a real-life Japanese anime character, not a doll. She even posted “I am not like a doll, a doll is like me …” as the tagline on her VKontakte profile page. Apparently, Nastya has been passionate about makeup even as a young child, always experimenting with it in the mirror. Over time she also developed a thing for Japanese cartoons and it was only a matter of time before she started using her make-up artist skills to transform herself into a real-life anime girl. But just putting on makeup wasn’t enough to attain that coveted look, so she decided to lose weight in order to seem more genuine. At 1.58-meters-tall, Anastasiya weighs just 39 kilos and is trying to lose one more in order to look just right. She has even taken the name Fukkacumi,to sound more Japanese.
Shpagina was interviewed by various Ukrainian newspapers and made appearances on television shows, where she admitted a lot of people are freaked out by her look swhen they see her on the streets of Odessa. She loves bumping into Japanese tourists, though. The young hairdresser says their eyes become as large as Europeans when they see how close her face resembles that of an anime character. Some of them try to talk to her, but they don’t speak Russian and she doesn’t understand Japanese.
Every day, Anastasiya gets up at five in the morning, in order to be at work by nine. That’s because she needs a lot of time to get into character. It takes her 30 minutes to do the makeup on one of her eyes, and the entire face is ready in about two hours. That’s probably why she would like to have surgery in order to change the shape of her eyes permanently. She says this kind of surgical procedure is very common in Japan, but she doesn’t know if it’s also available in the Ukraine. She would like to get her waist reduced surgically as well, in order to look more like an anime character. But for now, she has to make do with makeup in order to look as realistic as possible.
Nastya has said Valeria Lukyanova is one of her role models, and the two are actually pictured together in some of her photos. Although she does look exactly like a Japanese anime girl in some of the photos she posted online, in others she just looks like a huge-eyes creepy monster. Check out the photos and judge for yourself.
Videos are in Ukrainian
Photos: Fukkacumi and television show video captions
