A Popular Activity for Chinese New Year 2021 Was Cosmetic Surgery?!
In a previous article we shared how many people were required to stay in the city where they work and not go home for the Spring Festival due to concerns over Covid outbreaks. This group of people who couldn’t go home became nicknamed Yuan Nian Ren (原年人) in Chinese.
While some people spent the holiday with colleagues or friends instead, others took advantage of this time to get cosmetic surgery. Xia Ying, a girl who works at a cosmetic surgery hospital in Beijing says she had a heavy workload before CNY. She used to be busy between 11am to 5pm, but starting in the end of January, a couple weeks out from CNY, she never stopped being busy from 9:30am to 6:30pm. Even after she finished her work, many of the doctors were still working and some of them wouldn’t finish surgeries until 10 in the evening.
While the government’s requirement preventing people from traveling home caused a surge in people getting procedures done during the holiday this year, this trend isn’t completely new, it has always been common for girls to have new nails, new eyelashes, new haircuts and cosmetic surgeries before CNY.
Why Do People Get Cosmetic Surgery Done Before or During CNY?
For those that get it done before, it’s like buying new clothes or new bags for this important festival, people want to have new “faces” to meet parents, boyfriends’ parents and friends that they haven’t seen for a year.
For those that get it done during, it’s the recovery time. This festival usually has at least 7 days of vacation time, which is a perfect recovery time for some small cosmetic surgeries such as having double eyelids.
The other thing is the cold weather in winter. In winter, people tend to have less sweat which leaves less scarring and less chance of getting infected.
Why Are People Getting the Surgeries in the First Place?
Xia Ying, the girl who worked for the cosmetic surgery clinic, also noticed that some of the people who had surgeries during this year’s CNY were clients that consulted with her two to three years ago, but they didn’t make their decisions to have surgeries back then.
From talking to customers, Xia learned that some of the main reasons they came back and had surgeries were because their salaries got cut, they lost their jobs, or the business they tried to launch failed. They became less confident because of those changes in life and they wanted to improve themselves by either skills or appearance. Cosmetic surgery is a shortcut for them.
Dong Yang, who has worked in a cosmetic surgery clinic as consultant for 5 years said that before, many clients were having surgeries because their husbands had affairs and they wanted to look younger, spend their husband’s money and take revenge. But now, the majority of women who want to have surgeries are people who want to please themselves.
Consumer Demographics
As we mentioned in a previous article, nowadays, many of the consumers who are getting cosmetic surgery are younger. According to statistics from Geng Mei (更美), an app dedicated to helping consumers learn more about cosmetic surgeries and provide related information, over 80% of cosmetic surgery clients have bachelor degrees, 40% of them have income ranging from 10k to 20k RMB a month, and 14% of them have more than 20k RMB income every month.
Compared with older generations, young consumers have more channels to research cosmetic surgeries. They often get information from WeChat Official Accounts, cosmetic surgery websites, Xiaohongshu and friends.
Men Are Joining The Trend
In 2019, the number of male clients grew 52.3% from the year prior. A common need among male consumers is hair implants. Compared with other surgeries, hair implants is an expensive one and it costs around 10k to 40k RMB.
Based on statistics provided by ISAPS, the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, men in higher profile positions tend to pay more attention to their looks and have higher consumption ability, along with shorter time for making the decision to take surgeries.
Problems Beneath The Prosperity Of The Cosmetic Surgery Industry In China
According to a report from Frost & Sullivan, China was the second biggest cosmetic surgery market in the world in 2018, taking up 13.5% of the market share globally. It is expected that from 2018 to 2023, the market in China will keep growing with a compounding annual growth rate of 24.2%, becoming the TOP10 fast-growing market in the world.
But the market isn’t entirely safe. The biggest issue is that some clinics are operating without government certificates and they are not being responsible for their customers, such as injecting poisonous liquid into customers’ faces or running out-of-date machines to cheat customers.
On February 2, 2021, an actress Gao Liu (高溜) published a Weibo post saying how her health and her career were affected by having cosmetic surgery on her nose. It was an unsuccessful surgery and she had to stop filming for a TV series for which she could stand to lose up to 2.4M RMB from.
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