What is ahegao and why is it so popular?
They year is 2021. You open Instagram, Youtube, or any other social media, and chances are you’ll see a lot of eyes open, crossed and rolled back, with tongues sticking out. This is ahegao, the sexy facial expression that is flooding the internet.
But what does it mean and where does this phenomenon come from?
History of ahegao
Ahegao might seem to be the craze nowadays, but it’s not something new at all. In fact, it’s a popular fetish in hentai – Japanese adult animation –, that has been around for longer than most people reading this article.
Though many believe that the first mention of ahegao in anime dates back to the 1990s, truth is, there are earlier known records of it in the hentai market as far back as the 1960s. In those hentai comics, ahegao was used to describe the facial expressions of their characters as they reached orgasm – eyes rolling back, tongue exposed, and panting of blushing. The idea was to show an intense level of arousal, reaching the point of losing their faculties completely. The word itself comes from a combination of “ahe”, a Japanese onomatopoeia used to describe a female’s moan and sexual excitment, and “kao”, the Japanese word for face. Pretty self-explanatory.
Why did it become so popular?
Ahegao proliferated in the last decade in the Western world thanks to the increasing popularity of hentai sites. What started as a recurring element in Japanese porn comics, is now a bandwagon that made it into the mainstream and can be found even in selfie culture.
The reason of ahegao’s popularity is simple: it symbolizes a loss of control, and that alone is alluring. It unlocks a new fantasy for many – imagine having or giving someone such a powerful orgasm, that their faces transform completely. Hot, isn’t it? Others just find it humorous; of course nobody looks like that when they cum, that’s why that disproportionate response is funny.
The demand of ahegao is such, that it even got its own niche in porn. Ahegao porn is a popular category that you can find in famous adult sites like Stripchat.
And we can’t talk about ahegao without bringing up the absolute queen of it, internet sensation Belle Delphine. She has her part in making ahegao so popular, as she became notorious because of her cute content which featured ahegao faces. Thus, a lot of people who were not familiar with anime, got introduced to ahegao through her.
Belle Delphine managed to make a career from her ahegao faces, which culminated in her selling bottles of her bath water for $30 on the internet. So you never know where making an ahegao face might take you.
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