Notes

ABG makeup, taken apart

Last updated: 22 August 2026

ABG makeup is a specific, nameable set of choices, and the aegyo-sal highlight under the eye is the one detail most write-ups get wrong.

ABG makeup is a specific, nameable set of choices: straight brows with little arch, a dewy or glass base, gradient lips fading from centre to bare edge, a glitter or smoky lid, a long straight wing, lashes worked on the bottom lash line as well as the top, and a highlighter placed to bring out the aegyo-sal, the puffiness under the eye. It names a subculture style, not an ethnicity.

Where the name comes from

ABG stands for Asian Baby Girl. It is internet slang, not a term any beauty brand invented. The earliest recorded use dates to the 1980s, describing women in Asian American gangs, and accounts differ on whether the term started on the West Coast or in New York's Chinese American community. The subculture was built by Asian American women themselves rather than imposed on them from outside, and it stayed a small, local term for two decades before it went mainstream in the 2010s through the Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits and a wave of "ABG transformation" videos on YouTube. Along the way the word drifted from describing gang-adjacent women specifically to describing a look: dyed or highlighted hair, coloured contact lenses, long nails and lashes, and the makeup on this page.

Where does the term ABG come from?

From inside the community it describes, as slang usually does, before it spread further than that community could control. That is worth saying plainly because most explainers treat "ABG" as if it labels who someone is. On this page it does not. It labels a set of choices someone made about their face and their hair, and those choices are learnable and describable independent of who is making them, which is the only part of the term this page is interested in.

Is ABG makeup only for one group of people?

The term names the style, not a rule about who is allowed to wear it. This page describes the techniques the way it would describe a smoky eye or a French tip: as a set of moves, not a membership.

Aegyo-sal, the detail that carries the look

Most write-ups of this style list a glitter lid and a gradient lip and stop, and that is the half of it that photographs. The half that does the actual work sits underneath the eye, and it has a name most of those write-ups skip.

What is aegyo-sal?

Aegyo-sal (애교살) is Korean for "charm fat", and it names a narrow ridge of the orbicularis oculi, the ring muscle that wraps the eye, sitting just under the lower lash line and becoming more pronounced when someone smiles or narrows their eyes. It is not the same feature as an under-eye bag, and confusing the two is the most common mistake in this whole category. A bag sits lower on the face, is loose skin rather than muscle, and its lower edge is soft and undefined. Aegyo-sal sits right against the lash line, is muscle rather than skin, and its edge is a thin, sharply defined crescent. In Korean beauty culture it is treated as a feature worth having, not a flaw worth hiding, which is the opposite of how most Western makeup guidance treats anything under the eye.

The makeup move built around it is a highlighter, usually pearl or soft shimmer, swept along that crescent, sometimes paired with a thin, soft shadow line drawn just beneath it. The shadow is what gives the highlight something to sit against: light alone reads as shine, light next to a small line of shadow reads as a fold, and a fold is what turns a flat strip of highlighter into the look of an actual puff of fullness.

Can makeup put an aegyo-sal there if it isn't there naturally?

Only within what light and shadow can do. The puff itself is anatomy, muscle and in some faces a small pad of fat under the skin, and no amount of pigment adds volume that isn't there. What the highlighter-and-shadow pairing does is make an existing aegyo-sal read more clearly in a photograph, the same way contour reads as a shadow rather than an actual change in bone. Looksmith will not build a fat pad that a face does not have, because that is face geometry, the one category Looksmith leaves alone entirely. What Looksmith renders is the placement: highlighter and a soft shadow line positioned under the eye, using the eye structure already in your own photograph rather than reshaping it.

The look, region by region

Twelve regions carry a Looksmith look. Nine of them do the specific work that makes a look read as ABG rather than as a smoky eye or a soft glam face.

Why does the eye get worked on the bottom lash line too?

Because a Western smoky eye almost always stops at the top lash line and treats the bottom as an afterthought, a light smudge of the same shadow at most. ABG makeup treats the bottom lash line as its own region: individual lashes or a half-strip, sometimes a thin liner underneath as well. That is the single easiest tell between the two styles in a still photograph, more reliable than the glitter or the wing, because it is the region most other looks leave undone.

Why a straight wing instead of a curved one?

A curved cat-eye follows the natural upward sweep of the eye and stays close to the lash line the whole way. The wing in this style is drawn flatter and longer, extended well past the outer corner in something closer to a straight line than a curve. It reads sharper and more graphic in a photograph, which is also why it pairs with a straight brow instead of an arched one: the two straight lines, brow above and liner below, frame the eye rather than lifting it.

Two regions makeup alone does not reach

Circle lenses and hair colour show up in most ABG references, and neither one is a makeup region, which is worth separating out plainly.

Coloured contact lenses change the visible iris, usually toward grey, honey or a warm brown wider than the natural iris edge. Looksmith renders iris colour the same way, as a contact-lens effect in a realistic human shade, painted onto your own eye rather than swapped in from someone else's. A money-piece or ombre hair colour, the second common element, is within reach the same way: Looksmith changes hair colour and dye placement, not the haircut underneath. Length, layering, parting and any bangs stay exactly as they are in your own photograph, because a haircut is not a region a look can render.

Seeing it on your own face

A counter can sell a wing liner and a gradient lip separately. It cannot show you the two together, on your own eye shape, with your own aegyo-sal, before you buy either one.

Looksmith renders that combination onto your own photograph. With Looksmith you save a Likeness once, a set of selfies that becomes your reusable face, then pick a look. Three ways in: Style Me puts you in several looks at once, Create Look takes a written description, and Mirror a Look takes an inspiration photograph, an ABG look someone else posted, for instance, and transfers the makeup from it onto your own face rather than pasting your face onto theirs. A Looksmith look takes roughly a minute and comes back as a 9:16 poster, with an optional silent four-second looping clip, and the products it used are listed beside the look.

Can I try Looksmith's ABG look on my own face?

Not yet, because Looksmith has not released. It is an iOS app from Mirable Labs, Inc., coming soon to iOS, with a waitlist in the meantime. The first six Looksmith looks are free, granted at onboarding, and after that Looksmith runs on credits bought in packs, with no subscription and none planned. Looksmith's pricing is set at launch, so there is no figure to print here. More on who builds it is on the about page, and the handling of the selfie itself is covered in the privacy policy.

Will Looksmith change my face shape to fit the look?

No. Looksmith renders pigment, finish and placement, not bone. Looksmith will not slim, lift or reshape anything, will not touch eyelid topology, so a monolid stays a monolid under whatever liner sits on it, and will not change your age, your pose or your expression. What comes back is your own photograph with a specific set of choices painted into it, the same choices this page just walked through one region at a time.

The short version

ABG makeup is a set of moves you can name: straight brows, a dewy base, a long straight wing, glitter concentrated at the centre of the lid, both lash lines worked instead of one, a gradient lip built from a darker liner, and a highlighter placed to bring out the aegyo-sal already under the eye. That last one is the detail worth remembering above the rest, because it is the one most write-ups mislabel as an eye bag and try to conceal instead of define.