臥蠶
Wajam (Resting Silkworm, 臥蠶)
The spot just under the eye that plumps up when you smile is what Korean today calls aegyo-sal. Old gwansang plates named it wajam (臥蠶), a ‘resting silkworm’.
A silkworm asleep under the eye is a lovely piece of word history on its own. Here it sits beside the psychology of why one smiling eye can make a whole person look kind.
Editorial markA plate for examining the names a culture placed on the face.
Location plate
A silkworm under the eye
On the plate, the wajam is the soft horizontal ridge right below the lower lashes. It plumps when the orbicularis oculi muscle contracts in a smile, and it sits above, and apart from, under-eye bags or dark circles.
Korean standard dictionaries gloss wajam as ‘the raised part under the eye, in face-reading’. The characters are literally ‘lying down’ (臥) and ‘silkworm’ (蠶): a silkworm resting on its side.
- Plate label
- 臥蠶
- Anatomical term
- under-eye ridge (orbicularis oculi)
Name and tradition
Where the name comes from
Traditional charts wrote wajam just under the eye and are said to have overlapped the area with the twelve palaces' ‘children palace’ (namnyeogung, 男女宮), tying it to stories about offspring. That is the imagination of an old scheme, and the look of the under-eye is not used to judge anyone's family life.
Silkworms wove silk and were treasured in the old household economy, so a full, lively under-eye is customarily said to have been read as an auspicious shape. A whole sericulture culture glints inside one word.
Psychology in contrast
Smiling eyes and the halo effect
The halo effect, reported by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, is the bias where one standout positive impression brightens unrelated judgments. One warm eye-smile and ‘kind and capable’ gets bundled in for free. It is a mental shortcut, not evidence.
The way a genuine smile spreads to the eyes traces to the 19th-century French physiologist Guillaume Duchenne, whose observations gave the ‘Duchenne smile’ its name: smiles that engage the eye muscles read warmer. That is why the wajam spot punches above its size in impressions.
Texts and research
Sources for this plate
- Korean standard-dictionary gloss of wajam (臥蠶): the raised part under the eye in face-reading
- Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, ‘Gwansang’ entry: the children palace among the twelve palaces
- Thorndike (1920), Journal of Applied Psychology: the halo effect
- The ‘Duchenne smile’, named for Guillaume Duchenne's 1862 studies of expression
Terms and further reading