Facekini puzzles fashion-conscious West

Imagine, you’re minding your own business, lost in pleasant daydreams as you bob around in gentle ocean swells at a public beach.

Suddenly, a masked figure pops to the surface next to you. Your reaction? Do you laugh? Gasp? Scramble to the shore to alert civil defense authorities?

I suppose that depends on your temperament. I can imagine just about any reaction … except for indifference.

Yet colleagues at China Daily tell me nobody would raise an eyebrow on Chinese beaches.

The “facekini” is as normal in China as noses thickly pasted with sunscreen lotion are in the West.

Maybe the fashion accessory is another example of the farsighted sensibility of Chinese customs. After all, just a week ago, Hawaii banned the use of sunscreen lotions at beaches because they kill off coral colonies.

The facekini is green — not necessarily literally.

But it’s going to take some doing before we Westerners warm up to the idea.

We’re very particular when it comes to fashion. And what would you expect from a culture that invented the leisure suit?

We have some remarkable haute couture accomplishments to our credit.

Was it not the West that came up with blue jeans, invented for the working man of the late 19th century, the farmer, cowboy, fisherman, mechanic.

As prosperity grew, jeans rose in stature, and by the 1960s they became the official college student uniform.

But they got much more expensive and came to be worn preferably much too large, with boxer shorts to cover the rump when they sagged from behind.

Skinny jeans followed, John Lydon made for people who look at photos of food for nourishment. These jeans narrowly averted being banned because when wearers would sneak food, their stomachs rapidly expanded, popping the waist buttons off at high velocity, greatly endangering bystanders.

Fortunately for public safety, skinny jeans are on the way out, being replaced by something infinitely more sensible: pre-ripped jeans.

Clothing is a means of self-expression in the West. Nothing shows that better than your choice of headwear.

There are the too-large baseball caps with enormously stiff visors. You pull them down over your brow as far as they’ll go to make your ears stick out — I’m not sure what the message is.

There are baseball caps with the visors reversed, showing that you’re inordinately worried about what color people think the back of your neck is. These have fashionable adjustable plastic bands to adorn your sunburned forehead.

There are skullcaps with propellers on top to say your inner child got the upper hand. There are bowler hats to make you look stodgy. These have the added advantage of conveying that you’re genetically unable to pronounce derby as dErby (“er”, like her) and instead dArby (“ar”, like car).

Too-small black fedoras tell the world that your favorite film is The Blues Brothers, and umbrella hats shout out that you’re impervious to what anyone thinks about your looks.

There are ten-gallon cowboy hats to convey you’re embarrassed about being small. And there are stovepipe hats to say you’re really, really embarrassed about being small, and that you speak in riddles like, “My grandfather was born four score and seven years ago.”

For the non-petite, the French invented the beret, which says, “Why can’t you just see me as being an intriguing internationalist instead of very tall?”

But getting back to masks, nobody in the West wears those nowadays except for trick-or-treaters, bank robbers or lucha libre wrestlers.

PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY The facekini, a mask that hit the market in 2004, has seen a spike in popularity among swimmers and beachgoers looking to prevent sunburn.