What is fitness to you? Chinese netizens let a piece of A4 paper decide.
Popular Chinese social media platform Weibo has been flooded by hundreds of netizens showing off their paper-thin waists by comparing them to a sheet of A4 paper (21cm x 29.7cm).
The A4 paper has to be held vertically (holding it horizontally is cheating) and if there’s no tummy sticking out, then it means that the person is in good shape.
With the hashtag #A4Waist and #我有A4腰 (translation: I have an A4 waist), the trend has been attracting both men and women in China, spurring tens of thousands of comments from Chinese netizens. While some were excited to take on the #A4Waist challenge, there were also others who said that they found the “beauty craze” disturbing.
“Bodies don’t need eyes staring at them,” Ms. Zheng Churan wrote on a piece of A4 paper that she held horizontally below her waist. “I love my fat waist.”
Chinese GQ’s fashion features editor Mr. He Xiaobin said, “I find it completely stupid. Everybody has a different frame and body shape.” adding that the A4 waist challenge annoyed him for allowing “certain people to gain bragging rights, while leaving others in dismay”.
As seen in the image above, one Weibo user Joe Wong even mocked the challenge by posting a selfie of himself covering his face with an A4 paper with a caption saying, “I have A4 face.”
This is not the first time that a strange beauty trend has taken the Chinese interwebs by storm. Last year, a “reaching your belly button from behind to show your good figure” spawned 104,000 active discussion threads on Weibo. Thousands of netizens uploaded photographs of themselves reaching behind their backs and around their waists to touch their belly buttons.
Sources: shanghaiist, Straits Times, mashable, BBC.
