For evidence of China’s $50bn obsession with cosmetic surgery, look no further than a “little red book”.
That is the English translation of Xiaohongshu, the beauty-focused ecommerce and social media app popular among young Chinese women on which the hashtag #PreAndPostOp has garnered more than 290,000 posts. Many of them flaunt before-and-after photos of overhauled jawlines, plumper lips and reconstructed cheekbones.
But since the start of July, the market value of the country’s three biggest publicly traded medical aesthetics companies has fallen by a third, representing a collective loss of more than $17bn, despite the popularity of cosmetic procedures.