From Mao to Maybelline
Forget about socialist rectitude: China's quest for bourgeois beauty is fueling a cosmetics craze.
By Susan Jakes/Beijing

Spring 2005 Style & Design
Jin Yijun swears she can feel the years melting away. Perched on a stool at the recently opened La Mer counter at Beijing's upscale Scitech department store, the 31-year-old, who works in the local office of a Hong Kong—based company, is savoring her first exposure to Crème de la Mer, a luxurious skin cream. A smiling saleswoman in a seafoam tunic dabs a tiny spoonful of "serum" under Jin's eye and massages it until it vanishes. "I think I can feel the tightening," says Jin. Minutes later, she has returned a bagful of purchases at the nearby Lancôme counter and splurged on a jar of Crème de la Mer and a bottle of Serum de la Mer. The price tag: $683—more than half of Jin's monthly income.

Jin and her unguent-hungry counterparts are still a rarity in the Middle Kingdom, where for decades wearing anything more than a revolutionary flush was cause for censure and public humiliation. Some two decades after capitalist-style reforms were first launched, only 7% of China's 1.3 billion inhabitants buy cosmetic products. But according to a recent report by economists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, cosmetics and beauty sales in China have ballooned from $24 million in 1982 to a projected $21 billion this year, and will probably double in the next five years. Cosmetics has become one of the most heavily foreign-dominated consumer markets in the country, with overseas brands accounting for more than 90% of sales. China, says Estée Lauder brand president John Demsey, represents "simply the greatest single geographical opportunity in the world today."

China's beauty blitz began in the early 1990s when direct marketers like Avon and Mary Kay built enormous businesses. So-called prestige brands like Estée Lauder, Clinique and Lancôme floundered, not only because their wares were too expensive for most Chinese women but also because they were sold through department stores, which until recently barely existed in China. In 1998, in an effort to combat pyramid schemes, Beijing banned direct marketing. Avon rebounded by setting up boutique storefronts, which now number close to 6,000. The fancier brands, meanwhile, have piggybacked on an upswing in department-store openings. Lauder now has 39 counters in 19 Chinese cities and will open 15 more by June. L'Oréal operates some 50 Lancôme counters and owns Maybelline, China's leader in mass-market makeup.

China's women have quickly become discerning. Says Bai Ling, who has peddled Lancôme for eight years: "Now [customers] come knowing exactly what they want." Like many of their Asian neighbors, Chinese women equate beauty with pallor. Thus most major brands have developed skin-care lines for the Asian market that claim to be able to make the sallowest of complexions gleam like luminous white jade. But global brands know that their cachet still lies in being foreign. Aerin Lauder, a senior vice president at Estée Lauder and a granddaughter of the company's founder, says she has no immediate plans to use Chinese models in her advertising campaigns. "I don't want to walk away from the brand and find some local person and put them in a light box," she says. "The brand is the brand." And for the moment, that's exactly what Chinese women want.

— With reporting by Jodi Xu/Beijing

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