New wealth buys a fresh face in modern China
(AP)Updated: 2007-03-07 19:30
Double eyelid techniques today are much more subtle and give the appearance of larger eyes, he said, but do not try to make Asian women look Caucasian.
"Cinderella" contestant Yang Shaqin, a Beijing undergraduate, said she always wanted to look more like her mother. After eight procedures, she no longer felt like an ugly duckling but insisted she would never date a man shallow enough to have cosmetic surgery.
"We have a Chinese saying, 'A man should possess talents and a woman grace,"' Yang said. "Men shouldn't be worried about these trivial sorts of things."
These trivial things are driving a booming industry. And Chinese men are also not shy about using products and sometimes surgery to look better.
About 10 percent of the clients at the Yahan clinic are men, said Li, and the concept of the metrosexual has arrived, known in Mandarin as "dushi yunan" or "urban pretty man." They spend an average of $10 a month on grooming products, according to a report in the official Xinhua News Agency in December.
Xinhua cited a survey of 2,239 men aged 18 to 60 in seven Chinese cities that found men in Shanghai to be the country's most vain because they spent just over 17 minutes a day gazing in the mirror.
Men and women together spent $12 billion on beauty products in 2005, up 13 percent from the previous year, according to the China Association of Perfume, Essence and Cosmetics Industry.
The United States Cosmetic, Fragrance, and Toiletry Association last year called China its "largest future growth market," and companies like Avon Products, Mary Kay, L'Oreal SA, and Procter & Gamble are all fighting for a share.
Zhang, the publisher, estimates there are about one million plastic surgeries a year in China. In the United States, with less than a quarter of China's population of 1.3 billion, twice as many operations were performed in 2005.
Hao Lulu, a Beijing fashion writer and aspiring actress, became a sensation in the Chinese media -- which dubbed her the "Artificial Beauty" -- after she had 16 surgeries to redo her eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, neck, breasts, upper arms, buttocks, thighs and calves.
China, which had virtually no cosmetic surgery a few decades ago, now claims to be an innovator. Last year, a military-run hospital announced it had become the second facility in the world after France to attempt a complex partial face transplant -- grafting a donated nose, upper lip, cheek and eyebrow onto a farmer who had been mauled by a black bear.
Going to great lengths for beauty
The risks some take for beauty can be harrowing, especially in an industry that lacks regulation.
Wang Junhong, a 37-year-old fashion retailer from Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong province, collected elegant European trousers that she adored but couldn't wear because she was only 5 feet 2 inches tall.
So she spent US$9,700 to gain two inches in a procedure that involved breaking her legs, driving pins into the bone and gradually cranking the pins apart to lengthen the bones as they heal.
"The more I thought about doing it, the more I was convinced I had to do it," said Wang, as she lay in a hospital bed in 2005, her legs encased in brutal-looking frames with spokes that jabbed through her legs.
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