Why Do South Asians Have Dark Circles Under Their Eyes?
What we’ve long dismissed as cosmetic may be revealing something deeper about our health.
Ananya Bansode was only 20 when her friends started pointing out the dark hollows that were suddenly appearing under her eyes. “Just sleep more,” some of them said. After other classmates started relentlessly teasing her, Bansode resorted to wearing glasses to hide her eyes. “I would sometimes get called a panda…it really shattered my confidence,” Bansode, now 26 and a makeup executive in Mumbai, told The Juggernaut. “I would find makeup to try and hide it, which only made it worse — and then people just got more reasons to make fun of me.”
It would take years before she got a proper diagnosis. Turns out that dark circles — common for many South Asians — can be warning signs for other conditions. The Juggernaut spoke to endocrinologists, dermatologists, and beauty influencers around the world to get to the bottom of the mystery of under-eye dark circles. Are they just cosmetic or should we be paying more attention? Here’s what we found.