In China, men are advertising lipstick, makeup, and face creams. Female consumers say it makes them feel empowered.
Walk through the streets of Shanghai, Seoul, or Tokyo, and you’ll likely find billboards featuring men with delicate facial features, dewy skin, visible makeup, and a youthful, androgynous look. Often, they’re advertising cosmetics or skin care products.
In recent years, Asia—and China in particular—has seen a boom in young male brand ambassadors. Pop idols such as Wang Yibo and Liu Haoran have been featured on ads for women’s facial masks and night creams.
Li Jiaqi, a fast-talking salesman known for testing lipstick on his own face, holds court every night with his live show on the shopping app Taobao Live, where he peddles everything from cosmetics to handbags.
According to the Daily Economic News, over 18 beauty brands, including Lancôme, YSL, and M.A.C, had appointed male celebrities as ambassadors in 2018 alone.
Many of them are young, with more than half of them born after 1995. They have such a presence in consumer marketing that their nickname—“little fresh meat”—has become a cultural cliche. Their growing numbers reflect the greater spending power of women in China.
It is a shift from women being told what to buy to please men to the ones being pleased.
Traditionally, female models were the main faces of Chinese beauty ads. The implication was that the products would help fulfill men’s expectations of women as objects of desire.
(Read more: 150 million people tuned in to watch Li Jiaqi sell lipstick for 7 hours)
In the 21st century, the roles appear to have reversed with the emergence of “little fresh meat” models. As more Chinese women become financially independent, they’re demanding a greater sense of power over their consumer choices.
It is a shift from women being told what to buy to please men to the ones being pleased.
The boyfriend experience
In September 2019, Estée Lauder announced that pop idol Li Xian would become the brand’s Asia-Pacific spokesperson.
The announcement on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, garnered 430,000 reposts, 200,000 likes, and 34,000 comments within 48 hours.
Most comments were hysterical outcries of joy from Li Xian’s mostly women fans. “My boyfriend is an official A-lister.” “On my way to buy products now to support my boyfriend.” “I can’t wait to try the same cream my boyfriend uses on my face!”
Of course, Li Xian isn’t dating any of them. Rather, they are fans who fantasize about him as their ideal boyfriend. Every year, millions of searches are made for products associated with a male idol on the shopping app Tmall, according to a 2018 report by Alibaba.
(Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post, which owns Goldthread.)
The narrative seems to work. The report revealed that fans who used the word “boyfriend” in their reviews were the highest spenders in the beauty category.
“I bought almost every beauty product Li Xian advertised because he represents everything I want in a boyfriend,” says Claire Li, a 28-year-old PR professional based in Shanghai. “He is gentle, handsome, and seems like a good listener.”
Claire Li explains that buying a product—even a beauty or cosmetics product—recommended by her “ideal boyfriend” makes her feel her own sense of power.
“I think on a psychological level, what is thrilling about this is that I feel like I am actively choosing to buy the brand and the product,” she says. “It is not any brand telling me what to do.”
“I think on a psychological level, what is thrilling about this is that I feel like I am actively choosing to buy the brand and the product,” she says. “It is not any brand telling me what to do.”
In China’s fandom language, fans like Claire Li are referred to as “girlfriend fans” who invest heavily—both in terms of money and mental energy—on the celebrity’s career.
(Read more: Why more women in China are choosing to be single moms)
For many “girlfriend fans,” spending money on their favorite celebrity-endorsed product is a concrete act of support to help him gain more ad commissions and achieve greater success. It flips the script on the traditional notion that men ought to dote on women.
Exploitation of this role reversal in advertising is not new. In the 1990s, the Japanese actor Takuya Kimura was featured in a commercial for Kanebo lipsticks, with his face covered in red lipstick stripes and a lustful gaze. The company’s lipstick sales tripled in two months.
In 2014, fashion designer Tom Ford’s namesake beauty brand launched a lipstick collection called "Lips & Boys," presenting 50 lipstick shades named after 50 men. The stock was immediately sold out.
Across cultures, women have traditionally been subject to the “male gaze,” depicted as passive objects of desire. But in these modern beauty ads, men are the subjects of beauty, with the women applying their gaze.
And in China, where mainstream society is still fairly conservative when it comes to gender roles, male beauty ads present a new way for women to feel in charge and exercise a sense of agency.
It’s getting men to freshen up, too
The rise of women’s spending power has not only placed more male faces in beauty ads but also pushed more men to take care of their appearance.
Mass media representation has played a crucial role. As more well-groomed, well-dressed men appear in the media, male consumers have started to feel pressure to mirror this image of the “ideal boyfriend.”
Women’s growing voice in Chinese society has also helped alter men’s conception of their own appearance.
(Read more: The Chinese photographer subverting gender norms one ‘little porno’ at a time)
With the prevalence of “little fresh meat” models, it has become common for women to openly comment on men’s appearances in online forums and at bars. Traditionally in China, this was restricted to men.
As a result, Chinese women have become more vocal about male grooming habits. Across e-commerce platforms, men are comprising an increasingly larger portion of the skin care market. Sales of men’s skin care and cosmetics in China grew 13.5% from 2016 to 2019, much higher than the global average rate of 5.8%, according to financial media CBN Data.
In a Tmall ad campaign last year, a man is shown using an eyebrow pencil in front of the mirror with his girlfriend.
Li Jiaqi, China’s live stream superhost who raised $145 million on Singles Day’s sales, said he has a large male fanbase.
“More and more men, especially those who live in first-tier cities, have grown more concerned about their appearance and started to pay attention to skin care,” he told the ONE magazine during an interview. “They will at least do their brows before going to work, and some of them even got eyebrow tattoos.”
(Read more: What’s it like to be plus-size in China?)
While many people have praised the male beauty phenomenon as a celebration of Chinese women’s rising social status, some critics believe the practice simply subjects men to the same beauty standards previously applied to women.
But since the male beauty trend is still a relatively new phenomenon, the lasting effect in changing social norms is up for debate. For now at least, women in China can rejoice in the fact that they are no longer the only ones putting effort into looking neat for a date.
