Appearance Anxiety Driving Chinese Consumers to Take Loans to Pay for Cosmetic Procedures
On Weibo, there are more than 100M people joining discussions about appearance anxiety and the related hashtag topic #你有容貌焦虑吗# (Do you have appearance anxiety?) was once on Weibo’s hot topic ranking board and the views reached 740M.
According to a 2020 cosmetic medicine report (2020医美行业白皮书), despite the COVID pandemic, Chinese medical cosmetology market grew 30% YOY, and it is expected to overtake the American market in 2021, becoming the top cosmetic medicine country in the world. In 2020 the Chinese medical cosmetology market reached 197 billion RMB, making up 17% of the world market.
Why Are People Becoming Obsessed With Cosmetic Medicine?
There are many reasons for the growing popularity of medical cosmetology in China, and the two most significant ones are: social media and women’s desire to feel more beautiful to make themselves happy.
Whenever you open Douyin, Kuaishou or Xiaohongshu, you see so many beautiful girls. They have milky skin, big eyes, double eyelids, pointed noses and skinny bodies. They often appear to be in high class restaurants and hotels, with many luxury products surrounding them.
On Xiaohongshu, some of them are generous to show their medical cosmetology experiences and even share the name of the hospital or agency where they had the surgery.
This, in some way, misleads people to think that once they are as pretty as those girls/boys, they can have the same quality of life. A girl named Chuchu (楚楚) said in this Tencent article that once you’ve seen so many beautiful girls on social media, you would rather look as pretty as them even you all look the same, rather than looking ugly and stand out among so many people.
Xiaohongshu is a very popular platform to discuss these procedures. In fact, there are over 780K posts about cosmetic procedures.There are also many people who will post their photos on Xiaohongshu and ask other users if they think they should get surgery. While some responses say no, many will often say yes.
According to Tencent, 80% of women are willing to pay for cosmetic medicine/surgeries, and 95% of them would have a second experience once they had one before. Common types of procedures include having double eyelids, shaping a pointed and high-bridged nose. And in fact, changing lip color is a common one. The color of my lips used to be very dark and had the procedure two months ago to change the color, and now I look okay instead of sick without putting any makeup on.
How Can People Afford These Procedures?
A small cosmetic surgery for example, having double eyelid or inserting prosthesis into the nose costs between 1k-8k RMB, while for bigger surgeries such as breast implant or liposuction cause 10k-60k RMB.
The majority of consumers undergoing these procedures are university students and young professionals that don’t have independent economic support so many of them are paying for them with credit cards or loans from payment providers such as Alipay and then paying it off slowly.
Lower Tier Cities Welcome Medical Cosmetology
China’s medical cosmetology market started growing in 2008 and since 2014, the market has been booming. Since 2018, the industry’s growth rate in first and second tier cities slowed down and more and more agencies are moving to lower tier cities.
The Xiachen market, or lower tier city market, is a key breakthrough hole for the cosmetic medicine industry. Compared with first and second tier cities, lower tier cities have less competition, require lower budgets, and thus, they are easy for those agencies to make profits.
Grey Area of the Industry
Among so many medical cosmetology agencies, in 2020 in China over 88% of them did not have legal licenses and only 28% of medical cosmetology doctors are certified. In addition to this, consumers are also concerned about fake products and machines.
However, with promotions from all sorts of agencies and users’ recommendations and sharing experiences on social media, my prediction is, there will be more and more people joining the trend, and the age of consumers trying out these procedures will continue to become younger.
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