"Appearance anxiety" in China: from "ring fat swallow skinny" to "appearance premium" business

(Image source: Tu worm network)

Li Peishan/Wen

On August 27, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the Guidelines for the Enforcement of Medical Beauty Advertising (Draft for Solicitation of Comments) for public comment. According to the guidelines, the market supervision department will focus on several situations in medical aesthetic advertising, the first of which is to create "appearance anxiety".

What is "appearance anxiety"? As the name suggests, people are unable to be satisfied with their appearance, which leads to anxiety. Judging from the data, "appearance anxiety" has become quite common in China. The Mob Research Institute report pointed out that about 76.40% of the people surveyed said that they had some degree of appearance anxiety about themselves, and 20.30% of the population thought they had moderate or even severe anxiety.

Since ancient times, Orientals have more appreciated the inclusive "ring fat swallow thin" female aesthetic, why are we now in the "appearance anxiety"? This article attempts to find some answers from the broader historical context and the analysis of the current real factors that cause "appearance anxiety".

In modern times, the west wind has gradually evolved, and self-transformation such as plastic surgery has begun to appear, but the emergence of "appearance anxiety" began with the quantifiable common standards such as "three girths" and "golden masks" began to grasp the right to speak about women's aesthetics - what can cause anxiety more than not meeting the standards.

The "appearance premium" in the job market pressure when the first batch of college students graduated gave "appearance anxiety" a chance, which contributed to the first boom in China's medical aesthetic market between 2003 and 2004. "Appearance anxiety" has really become a big business, and after the emergence and outbreak of community-based medical beauty apps and "net red economy" in 2014 and 2015, the intensified "appearance anxiety" has brought real money and silver.

The Standard of Traditional Oriental Beauty: The Tolerant "Ring Fat Swallow Skinny"

The most classic account of traditional Chinese beauties comes from "Wei Feng Shuoren", "Hands are like soft hands, and skin is like gelatin." The collar is like a cockroach, and the teeth are like a rhinoceros. The moth eyebrows, the smile is smart, and the beautiful eyes are looking forward to it. Wei Ren used a technique later known as BoYu to show the beauty of Zhuang Jiang, the duchess of Weizhuang, as a new bride, from multiple angles such as hands, skin, neck, teeth, forehead horns, smiles, and eyes.

This technique profoundly influenced the ancient Chinese literati. As a result, if we examine it from the perspective of modern people, we will find that the oriental beauties in their accounts always seem to face harsh aesthetic considerations. In his monograph "The Beauty Consciousness of Ancient Chinese", the Japanese scholar Kasahara Nakaji summarized the standards of the ancient Chinese ideal beauty according to the chapters of the Book of Poetry, including the Shuoren, as well as literary works such as Chu Ci, Luoshenfu, and Huainanzi: white skin, soft fingers, dark hair, high nose bridge, rosy lips, white teeth, and so on.

However, in the change of the times, the image of the standard beauty has also changed, which is the so-called "ring fat swallow thin". This broadened the Oriental tolerance for the aesthetics of beauty, as Su Shi said, "short, long, fat and thin have their own forms." With the help of writing and painting, we were able to look for these historical standards of beauty. During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the "Five Hu Chaohua", chaos and riding and shooting nations brought the spirit of freedom and liberation, and the natural beauty of women began to be appreciated. In the Tang Dynasty, the pursuit of natural beauty was combined with the weight enrichment brought about by a high-fat diet such as mutton, and "fullness" was praised as the standard of female beauty. In the Tang Dynasty painter Zhou Fang's "Picture of a Lady with Hairpin Flowers", the lady inherits the aesthetic of the beautiful woman with fair skin and rosy lips, but the most prominent aesthetic element in the visual is the rounded figure of the woman. In the Song Dynasty, the prosperity was difficult to regain, and the beauties of the Song Dynasty were required to be elegant and weak, specifically, "shoulders, flat breasts, willow waist, and slim feet" . The beautiful women in the Song Dynasty are as delicate as "the green snail hammerhead is small, and the willow soft flowers are delicate and weak" (Qin Guan", "Man Jiang Hong"), and even carries a sense of pathology, "Mo Dao does not extinguish the soul, the curtain rolls in the west wind, and people are thinner than yellow flowers" (Li Qingzhao,"Drunken Flower Yin"). In a yangliu youth painting, the painter focuses on the dolls of lotus flowers, sheng and osmanthus flowers (symbolizing Liansheng Takako) as the focus of the depiction, while the women in the painting are deprived of most of the beauty of the presentation.

As a strong culture, China's aesthetic inevitably influenced other East Asian countries, forming a similar standard of traditional oriental beauty. Zhao Jing, a professor at Meiji University, believes that from photographs and ukiyo-e paintings, we can find the ideal image of beautiful women in the last era when the impact from the West had not yet begun to affect the traditional Oriental aesthetic, that is, the Qing Dynasty in China and the Edo period in Japan. In his book The Search for the Beautiful Woman, Cultural History of Japanese and Chinese Beauty, he summed it up as "the ideal skin is white and smooth; a straight nose and lush hair." It can be seen that most of the standards of beauty in Japan in the Edo period inherited the standards of the ancient Chinese ideal beauty summarized by Kasahara Nakaji, but there are exceptions, such as shaving off eyebrows and blackening teeth.

It is worth noting that before being influenced by Western culture, the "figure" ("three circumferences") in the modern sense was hardly included in the aesthetic consideration of Oriental beauty. In Qing Dynasty China, it was generally accepted that slimness was a necessary criterion, but breasts and hips were not classified as aesthetic. If the two are too plump, they are almost considered ugly. In Gao Luopei's pen, the beauties in the Qing Dynasty's "talented beauty" love template often have an almost "straight- shaped" figure. What can be corroborated is that the Chinese corset culture has continued since the Song Dynasty, so that the Republic of China set off a vigorous "Heavenly Milk Movement" on the grounds of health to oppose it. In Japan during the Edo period, people shared the same view. "In everyday life, it is not good to emphasize the breasts and buttocks or to highlight the body lines." Zhao Jing wrote, "Not only that, but people also believe that covering breasts and buttocks with appropriate clothing is an indispensable etiquette for women. ”

Modern Oriental Beauty: Self-Transformation under the Progressive West Wind

Genes determine that most Mongolian faces appear flat, flat nose, single eyelid features, compared to Westerners tend to have deeper facial features and double eyelids.

After the modern era, Asia was opened by the strong guns of the West, and the turmoil of the times was accompanied by the gradual progression of the west wind. Whether it is China or Japan, the aesthetics of women are inevitably infiltrated by Western culture. Zhao Jing found in "In Search of Beautiful Women" that a considerable number of women in the early Meiji era photos taken in Japan were single eyelids, but in the first beauty contest held in Japan from 1907 to 1908, the vast majority of the winners had double eyelids. Judging from the surviving photos, the eventual pageant champion, Hinatsu Mineko, has a statue-like face and very visible double eyelids. "Faces with deep facial features like those of Westerners are unconditionally considered beautiful." "This is not just a Japan-only phenomenon, but a trend that has been widely observed in East Asia," he wrote. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, people were almost obsessively dominated by this aesthetic point of view. ”

The change in the image of the beautiful girl on the Shanghai moon card between the 1910s and the 1940s seems to support This view of Zhao Jing. In the 1910s and 1920s, most of the girls on the moon card were slender eyebrows and long eyes, and the facial contour was not very strong, still continuing the traditional oriental beauty aesthetic, but in the 1930s and 1940s, most of them were fashionable women with double eyelids, large eyes, high nose bridge, and westerners. In addition, in the 1930s, plastic surgery appeared in China, and women who aspired to become beautiful quickly accepted a Western-style appearance through surgical means such as double eyelids and rhinoplasty. At that time, the famous actress Bai Yang underwent "high nose surgery" and "double eyelid surgery", and her before and after photos were published in beauty advertisements in newspapers for publicity.

It can be said that after the 1930s, the "modern oriental beauty" with Western characteristics such as double eyelids and high nose bridge began to replace the "traditional oriental beauty" and became people's ideal imagination of oriental beauty. This phenomenon is partly due to the West's long drive of hard power in East Asia, and partly to the global expansion of industrialization and capitalism.

At that time, Asians had mixed feelings for the West and Westerners, and in addition to humiliation, they held the mentality of acknowledging that "backwardness will be beaten", actively learned its advanced points, and even held an almost worshipful mentality, which was also reflected in aesthetic standards. "In Search of Beautiful Women" points out that both Japan and China have seen an appreciation and worship of women with particularly long legs (even beyond the proportions of Westerners). In the novel, Junichiro Tanizaki is particularly disgusted by the symbol of traditional Japanese feminine beauty, such as "thick black hair and goose egg face", but he emphasizes and fascinates the beauty of long legs. Zhao Jing believes that "this reflects in an exaggerated form the widespread worship of the West in Japanese society during the Taisho period." He notes that in a women's pocket notebook produced by Shiseido in 1927, the illustration of a beautiful woman with a striking long leg "proves that civic pop culture has fully embraced the idea that long legs are attractive." In China in the 1930s, there was a similar cult of long legs, when the beautiful women in the advertisement dressed in Ming Dynasty costumes had long legs far superior to those of Westerners, and Zhao Jing pointed out that this was a spiritual victory method of the East over the West, but in fact it was still dominated by Western thinking, and the inside was still an excessive worship of the West.

The global expansion of industrialization and capitalism brought about the "modernity" itself. The word "modern" comes from a transliteration of the English word "Modern," and scholar Lian Lingling, in "Building a Consumer Paradise: Department Stores and Modern Shanghai Urban Culture," pointed out that in China in the 1930s, the image of a "modern woman" appeared. She believes that in fact, "modern women" are a global phenomenon in the first half of the 20th century, and there are modern women in New York, Tokyo, Beijing and even Mumbai. Lian Lingling attributed this to the global expansion of Western capitalism: "When European and American countries export industrial products to other regions through advertising, the image of beautiful women in advertising is also marketed all over the world. ”

The rise of Western consumer culture has allowed beautiful female figures from the West to be widely printed on commodities for promotion as a sign of "modernity". At the same time, this also makes this "modern beauty" a commodity that people subconsciously think they need and can buy. This consumer culture has also given birth to urban magazines that guide people's consumption and life, and Peng Lijun, a professor at the University of Chinese in Hong Kong, has called magazines such as "Liangyou Pictorial" and "Linglong" a "beauty guide": teaching female readers to learn how to give themselves the appearance of "right" rich and modern". In a cartoon published in Linglong, the editors compared the female stars who were popular in Hollywood at the time, claiming that Joan Blondell, who starred in "Enemy of the Nation," was the "standard beauty" of the world. This can be more fully explained why the "modern women" in Shanghai at that time were so enthusiastic about immature plastic surgery. The more they try to get close to the image of a "modern woman" through all-round consumption such as trendy cosmetics, wearing high heels, watching movies, and going to cafes, the more eager they will try to narrow the innate gap between themselves and such a Western aesthetic, and have double eyelids, a high nose bridge and plump breasts through surgery.

For contemporary China, which has caught up with the process of modernization, the criterion for judging whether a modern Oriental woman is beautiful should be more inclined to traditional Oriental or modern Western aesthetics, and whether it should be self-transformed, until now, it is still a topic of endless debate in all walks of life.

Anthropologist Susan Brownell once watched the 4th China Super Model Contest held in 1995 to promote models from China on the international stage. The most contentious question at the time, she recounts, was, "What kind of beautiful woman best represents China and is therefore best suited to show the image of China today on the world stage?" Susan Bao points out that models and their agents are fairly clear that decisions must be made between the dichotomy of "traditional Oriental beauty" and "modern Western women" to sell their own image. "Traditional oriental beauty" means that the model needs to maintain the shape of long hair, walk more slowly on the catwalk, look down to show shyness, and try to maintain the original facial features and body. The "modern Western model" means that the model's steps need to be more sonorous and powerful, actively responding to the audience's gaze, and making her face more three-dimensional by undergoing cosmetic surgery.

The Birth of Facial Anxiety: Unattainable Standard Beauty and "Beauty Premium"

Becoming a traditional oriental beauty means that you need to endure a nearly all-round detailed gaze, but in general, "ring fat" and "swallow thin" can be accepted. Becoming a modern oriental beauty means having to undergo some transformation, but in the aesthetic changes about oriental beauty, the figure that can be "standardized" (that is, "three circumferences" in the modern sense) that can be used for numbers is in a state of relative neglect.

Zhao Jing pointed out that the emergence of beauty pageants in the modern sense has made standard numbers and proportions such as "three circumferences" a measure of beauty, which means that the female aesthetic is detached from the subjective, and the objective common standard is born. The bust, waistline, and hip circumference of the contestants in the beauty contest are usually open. He believes that this is related to the general acceptance of the Western concept of "health is beauty" in post-war Japan, sports have begun to be regarded as elegant activities, women participate in tennis, swimming, gymnastics are all in the display of body curves and attract the attention of onlookers of sports, which contributed to the japanese society's aesthetic changes in beauty, "healthy, well-proportioned women are beautiful."

In China in the 1930s, after the "Heavenly Milk Movement" mentioned above, "curvy beauty" has also become a hot topic, Bao Tianxiao wrote in "The Hundred Years of Changes in Clothing, Food, Housing and Transportation": "As soon as the atmosphere is opened and gradually developed, tailors make clothes, and you must carefully measure your three-dimensional size; beauty pageants and beauty hunters must also pay attention to whether your carcass is suitable for the beauty posture." The standard aesthetic of "three circles" also stems from the emergence of the concept of "bodybuilding" in China. Like the previous government to participate in the promotion of the "Heavenly Milk Movement" to promote women's health, the National Government has adopted various administrative and legal means to promote sports and encourage women to participate in it, and the Western concept of "health is beauty" has been translated as "bodybuilding" and has been widely publicized, and "three circles" has become the most intuitive standard for measuring whether women are "bodybuilding".

The establishment in the East of this common standard of beauty measured by numbers meant that "appearance anxiety" emerged. Because precise numbers mean clear, measurable, and standard beauty gaps, this prompts women to touch these numbers hanging overhead, as if they could jump in, by all means, from exercise to cosmetic surgery, in order to achieve the desired numbers.

In contemporary times, such facial anxiety exists not only in the proportion of the body such as "three circumferences", but also in the proportion of facial features that are measured and calculated more precisely with numbers. Maxillofacial surgeon Stephen Marquardt invented the "Golden Mask." Based on a mathematical analysis of a golden ratio of 1/1.618, combined with his experience, he invented a program to measure the spacing within people's faces and the approximation between these faces and his ideal "golden mask". The "golden mask" has been rapidly absorbed into popular culture, accurately stimulating people's "appearance anxiety" and becoming a powerful persuasive tool for the plastic surgery industry to attract customers. On the Chinese Internet, plastic surgery ads that use the "golden mask" test to attract customers can also be seen everywhere.

The "look anxiety" inspired by standard beauty has brought prosperity to the plastic surgery and beauty industry. According to isaps (International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery), in addition to the United States and Brazil, which are tied for first place, China already has the third largest number of plastic surgeons in the world.

The standardization of beauty also means that quantifiable beauty becomes part of women's own strength, and not being beautiful enough compared to others means that they may become losers in employment, marriage, etc., which is enough to make people anxious. In fact, in the field of Western economics, there has been a special "pulchronomics" to quantify the study of the capital and associated unfairness that beauty brings to people.

In his 1994 paper, "Beauty and the Labor Market," the economist Daniel S. Hamermesh pointed out that there was a strong positive correlation between looks and total lifetime labor income, with the beautiful receiving a Beauty Premium and the ugly being levied an ugly penatly. In her 2011 book Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful, Homerès provided more quantitative data that, according to the average salary in the United States at the time, the income of people with beauty may be 3% to 4% higher than the average income of people below the average appearance, which means that beauty can help people earn an additional $230,000 in their lifetime. 。

"Value economics" was also established in China. In 2013, Jiang Qiuchuan and Zhang Kezhong published an article in Economics (Quarterly) entitled "The Economics of Beauty in China's Labor Market: Does Body Matter?" " paper. The paper points out that in China's labor market, women have a "precipitating appearance premium" than men, and for every 1 centimeter increase in women's height, their wage income will increase by 1.5% to 2.2%, while the "fat" body has a significant negative impact on women's wage income and employment. Chinese Min University Professor Zeng Xiangquan's 2019 paper "How Important is it to look good?—— the influence of appearance on income and a mechanism analysis" pointed out through the analysis of the data of the China Household Tracking Survey (CFPS2014) that in China, every 1 point increase in appearance score will increase individual income 3. 1%。

"Look Anxiety" Transforms Business:

Socialized medical beauty apps and the "influencer economy"

The "appearance anxiety" brought about by the "appearance premium" of the job market may have contributed to the first boom in china's medical aesthetic industry between 2003 and 2004: in 2003, the first batch of college students enrolled in the job market, and the number of ordinary college graduates in that year was 2.122 million, a net increase of 670,000 over 2002, an increase of 46.2%.

Anthropologist Wenhua, in her book "Looks Beautiful: Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery in China", believes that China's medical beauty market gradually expanded from the 1990s, but did not accelerate until 2003 and 2004: "Artificial beauty" Hao Lulu attracted great attention, and plastic surgery and beauty hospitals have taken inspiration from it to advertise themselves by transforming ordinary people; plastic surgery reality shows are in full swing, and even held artificial beauty pageants The first China Beauty Economy Report was also released during this period. "Coincidentally or not, the boom in the plastic surgery and beauty market coincided with the increase in the number of graduates entering the job market." Wenhua believes it is difficult to prove whether there is a direct causal relationship, but "the growing focus on personal appearance and plastic and aesthetic surgery is indeed related to the growing pressure of graduate unemployment." In the field, she met a female college student from a poor rural area who tried her best to get a facelift before graduation, and this female college student believed that "beauty is capital" and that in order to find a job and stay in a big city, it is worth using all means to gain a more prominent advantage in the severe employment situation.

In fact, it was not until after 2014 that the medical aesthetic market achieved real explosive growth. Behind this is the pressure given by the socialized medical beauty app and the boost of the "net red economy" to intensify the "appearance anxiety", and consumers pay real money for it.

According to the China Plastic Surgery and Beauty Association, in 2014, more than 7 million people in China, mainly young women, underwent cosmetic surgery. At that time, the size of China's medical aesthetic market, which was just starting out, was about 50.1 billion yuan, and reached 179.5 billion yuan in 2020 six years later. Between 2014 and 2020, the compound growth rate of China's medical aesthetic industry market was 24%, far exceeding the compound growth rate of the US medical aesthetic market.

It was also in 2014 that the Entrepreneurial App of the Internet medical beauty platform was frantically launched after the venture capital capital, and there were more than 60 medical beauty apps at its peak. Most of these apps adopt the "content + community" model, through a large number of original plastic surgery diaries and life sharing after the transformation of beauty, as well as interactive Q&A, which greatly encourages and stimulates women who are still waiting to dispel their concerns and "become better themselves" through medical beauty. This method greatly encourages consumers' "appearance anxiety" and reduces the cost of consumer decisions to do medical beauty.

At present, the largest Internet medical beauty platform Oxygen has come out on the track through the launch of the "Beautiful Diary" function in May 2014, and the "Beautiful Diary", which has accumulated more than 3.5 million articles, is regarded as the "valuable asset" of the platform.

Compared with the traditional customer acquisition channels of traditional medical beauty through diversion, advertising, and search bidding, the main "planting grass" customer acquisition channel of the Internet medical beauty App has an amazingly low customer acquisition cost. Encouraging women's medical aesthetics, "appearance anxiety" has become the biggest business of Internet medical aesthetic platforms.

The business of "appearance anxiety" has also continued to further expand its territory in major Internet communities, and the gray industry of "notes from ordinary people" and KOLs "generation" has grown considerably. According to the investigation of the Beijing News peeling onions, there is a mature "ghostwriting" market behind the dense medical aesthetic experience posts on the Internet - bid by medical beauty institutions, intermediaries matchmaking, writers take orders, bloggers send on behalf of, and packages are clearly marked. A fake grass post can be written for 5 yuan, while the most skilled writer can complete one in only 5 minutes.

The emergence of the "net red economy" economy has made it possible to "monetize appearance" and boost "appearance anxiety" directly linked to the objective income prospects. The year 2014, when the medical beauty mentioned above really broke out, was also a key year for the rise of the Internet celebrity economy. In 2015, as the first year of the "net red economy", Taobao announced that 5 of the top ten non-Tmall women's clothing stores in terms of annual sales were opened by Internet celebrities. Also in the same year, venture capital capital poured into the live broadcasting industry, the Internet celebrity economy further exploded, more than 200 live broadcasting platforms created a market of about 9 billion, and the outstanding appearance of Internet celebrities is the most direct and fastest factor in the "attention economy" to catch the audience's attention. Internet celebrities seem to have become a profession with very bright income and prospects, which is difficult not to stimulate a large number of young people to have "appearance anxiety", trying to squeeze into the fast lane of life by becoming beautiful and then "realizing their appearance".

In fact, in recent years, the live broadcast of medical beauty has become entangled with the "net red economy" and the socialized medical beauty App. According to the data released by the more beautiful app of one of the head platforms, the cumulative number of medical beauty live broadcasts in the "Double Eleven" App in 2020 exceeded 10,000, and the order volume increased by 349%. This is also the "Medical Beauty Advertising Law Enforcement Guidelines (Draft for Comments)" to focus on the operation direction of cracking down on "appearance anxiety", the opinions require that those who make a recommendation certificate for medical beauty in their own name or image should be identified as an advertising spokesperson, and medical beauty is required not to use an advertising spokesperson to make recommendations and certificates for them.

Finally, there is still a question of how to deal with "appearance anxiety". As analyzed in this article, in essence, "appearance anxiety" as an exogenous anxiety, more responsible for it is in the "appearance anxiety" business parties. To know that if the wrong sails are raised, the boat will sail again and ride the wind and waves, and may eventually sail in the wrong direction and cause it to drown, so it is better to listen to the direction that the tide chooses itself: just as recently on social networks, many people miss the "you are beautiful" slogan of cosmetics ten years ago.