Dictionary

China girl en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (US, countable, uncountable) A moving or still image of a woman or mannequin, used by film processing technicians to calibrate colour balance and exposure of skin tones in reproduction.
   • It is really amazing how easily colorists can screw up the look of your film with a few misconceptions about proper skin tones and by using the dreaded china girl. (A china girl is a pasty white specimen of a girl that a colorist uses as a reference when balancing the colors on your film.) 2000, Bret Stern, How to Shoot a Feature Film for Under $10,000^(https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7274698M/How_to_Shoot_a_Feature_Film_for_Under_10_000_(And_Not_Go_to_Jail)), page 172:
   • If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer. There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble. Flesh is different. Flesh needs to resemble flesh. It has a norm, a referent: the China girl. Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces. And if faces look wrong, we question everything. 2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 6, in Flamethrowers, page 86:
   • A final group of Hollywood’s usually invisible working class is introduced in Fisher’s comments about the use of the China Girl, the images of women dressed in multicolored clothes that are often seen on heads and tails of reels of film. The China Girl’s function is to act as a color-control standard: The skin-tone of white skin is the norm against which other colors are measured. 1993, Scott MacDonald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies, page 60:
2. (countable, qualifier:street name, slang, uncountable) The opioid drug fentanyl.
3. (countable, uncountable) Name given to cultivars of various tree, shrub and plant species, including dogwood, holly, orchids, etc.
4. (attributive, countable, uncountable, with reference to hair) Straight, glossy, cut short, with a fringe / bangs.
   • […] when she was on her own she had to remove her contacts and don the chestnut brown ‘China Girl’ wig that was the centrepiece of her daily disguise. 2002, James Flint, 52 Ways to Magic America, page 223:
   • Rondo’s also over-the-top fem. Like Richard Simmons queeny, but the Chicano version with an asymmetrical China-girl bob. 2004, Joel Barraquiel Tan, “Rondo”, in Edmund White and Donald Weise, editors, Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, page 282:
   • Her hair was black and straight, cut in a demure China girl cut that didn’t quite match her aggressive looks. 1987, Paul Allman, chapter 4, in No Pain, No Gain, page 24:
5. (countable, uncountable) Any of various cocktails.
6. (countable, dated, ethnic, offensive, slur, uncountable) A young woman of Chinese (or other East Asian) descent.
   • Coordinate term: Chinaman

Forms