Just a week after China’s latest beauty meme hit the Internet, yet another one has arrived: “The money wrist”. If you’re able to wrap a one hundred yuan bill around your wrist, then apparently you’ve “succeeded”.
As different denominations have different lengths, some netizens have taken on smaller denominations to show that their wrists are especially slender. A red one hundred yuan bill is 15.5 centimetres long, a blue ten yuan bill is 14, and a green one yuan bill is just 13 centimeters long.
The “money wrist” is just the latest in a long line of online memes that have become popular among Chinese women over the last year as a means of fulfilling an arbitrary standard of beauty.
Tallying up all of the recent Internet beauty memes leaves Chinese women with a remarkably unattainable standard of physical traits:
- flexibility and grace (folding hands behind back meme)
- long necks (roll of coins on collarbone meme)
- large breasts (groping own breasts meme; underboob pencil meme)
- slender waist (A4 paper waist meme; belly button meme)
- tiny, compact knees (iPhone 6 leg meme)
Interestingly, the money wrist test flies in the face of the commonly held belief among Chinese that paper money is filthy. Paper currency is considered to be so dirty in China that it some physicians have blamed it on the spread of genital warts.
Last year, a gynecologist at Wenzhou City People’s Hospital concluded that two bank tellers contracted genital warts after handling money at work without washing their hands before going to the bathroom. And these are not isolated cases. In 2005, doctors informed a cashier named Li Jia, who had never had a boyfriend, that she contracted gonorrhea from handling paper money at not washing her hands before using the toilet. While in 2004, a 19 year-old cashier named Guo Jihong in Changchun contracted genital warts despite claims that she also had never had a boyfriend.
Chinese authorities routinely remind the public to wash their hands after touching paper currency.
