Key Takeaways:

• Beauty surgery has boomed in China over the past decade, as more and more beauty consumers feel pressure to conform to China’s rigid beauty standards.

• Young China’s beauty ideals differ from the individuality of the West, prizing a “white, thin, teen-looking” aesthetic.

• To create a more authentic connection with local consumers, brands must acknowledge the harsh societal standards that Chinese youngsters face and create ad-hoc narratives.

In 2012, after the actress Angelababy — who epitomizes China’s “web celebrity face” culture — was asked if she had ever gone through any surgery by Chinese media, her then-husband Xiaoming Huang immediately denied she had altered her appearance, insisting her beauty is 100-percent natural.

Back then, attempting to improve your looks through any surgical intervention was still widely considered a social taboo. As the Chinese proverb “everything given by your parents is sacred 身体发肤受之父母” states, any intent to alter your natural appearance is a breach of the Confucian filial piety because you shouldn’t see what your parents gave you as “not enough.”

But less than a decade later, plastic surgery has turned from a taboo to a collective craze among China’s younger generations. By 2019, China’s plastic surgery market had been growing at an annual average rate of 30 percent over the past four years — far above the global rate of 8.2 percent. Last year, 5,150 new medical aesthetics institutions opened in the country despite the pandemic, pushing China’s beauty surgery market size past $30.5 billion, which now accounts for 17 percent of the global share. According to the Medical Beauty Market Trends Insight Report, the market should exceed $46 billion by 2023.

Read more…

By Jiaqi Luo – August 17, 2021