Mrs Chen, who only gives her surname, is delighted that she can buy her favourite cosmetics in her provincial town of Zhenjiang, some 250km inland from Shanghai and close to the Yangtze River.
A beautician massages her face with serum at L’Oréal’s Lancôme counter in the gleaming Yaohan department store, as she explains: “I first heard of Lancôme through a friend and last year I saw this counter and tried products here. They make my skin feel softer.”
Zhenjiang is one of China’s smaller and less affluent “tier-three” cities, urban centres that consumer goods multinationals are targeting because of their potential for faster growth than the more saturated first-tier cities, such as Beijing or Shanghai, or even second-tier provincial capitals such as Nanjing.