Daily US Times: Like many of her peers, Ruxin, a 23-year-old girl from Guanzhou, scrolls her social media feed every day, but she is looking for something very specific – updates about plastic surgery.
She is planning to have “double eyelid” surgery where the surgeon will create a crease on the eyelid, that Ruxin hopes will make her eyes appear bigger.
She logs on to the Gengmei app regularly to hunt for the most suitable surgeon.
In an interview with BBC, she said: “There are so many clinics in the city but I want to make sure I go to a good one. It’s my face we’re talking about.”
Gengmei, which means “more beautiful” in Chinese, is one of several social networking platforms in the country dedicated to cosmetic surgery, where users leave status updates about all things plastic surgery, including nose and liposuction jobs.
Search results can be filtered by regions, clinics and treatments among others.
Since its launch in 2013, users of Gengmei have surged from 1m to 36m. More than half are young women in their twenties.
Similarly, cosmetic surgery platform So-Young has seen its monthly active users grow, from 1.4 million in 2018 to 8.4 million today.
Their popularity is an indication of the changing attitudes towards plastic surgery in China, which now performs more operations than any country in the world after the United States.
The market in China has almost trebled in value in four years to some 177bn yuan ($27.3bn; £19.7bn) in 2019, according to a Deloitte report- an annual growth rate of 28.7%, well above the global rate of 8.2%.
The Global Times, the mouthpiece of Chinese communist party, said if this continues, China could become the world’s largest cosmetic surgery market by the middle of the decade.
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