Beauty Devices Are Young Chinese Consumers' New Toy. How Did They Catch On?

Technical jargon, social networks and influencers, plus a fear of "early aging" — a new electronic toy is born

Wet your face, apply cleanser, switch on the cleansing brush and glide it over your skin for two to five minutes.

Once your face is clean, use a facial steamer to open the pores. Still no skincare yet: spread on the gel, then move a radiofrequency (RF) device in circles across your face. This, supposedly, lifts and firms.

Toner, then serum, paired with an infusion device, and only then the face cream. Finish by working over your face with a microcurrent massager.

If you follow the beauty influencers on Xiaohongshu and Weibo, this is the basic routine.

Cleansing brushes, facial steamers, hair removers, face-mask devices, face-slimming devices — if you see several of these on a woman's dressing table, don't be surprised. They are many female consumers' new toys.

Every beauty device makes the same promise: a few minutes a day, kept up over time, will show results. They also share a high price. Among the five best sellers on Tmall, everything but the domestic brands is expensive — entry models run about 1,000 yuan, and mainstream high-end ones reach 3,000 to 4,000.

"Consumption upgrade" alone cannot explain the boom — if that were all, people would simply buy pricier cosmetics. The companies behind these devices have also sold consumers on a particular idea: for washing your face, rubbing in moisturizer or putting on makeup, hands are no longer enough.

You need technology, the makers say. Only ultrasound, LED light, radiofrequency and microcurrent can slim your face, fight aging, drive skincare into the skin and, in the end, make you beautiful.

Consumers are buying it, at least in China

According to the market research firm Euromonitor International, cleansing brushes and personal-care appliances (the former plus shavers, hair removers and oral care) grew in China at compound annual rates of 11% and 8% over the past two years. For cleansing brushes alone, Guotai Securities and Euromonitor estimate the market will go from 2.24 billion yuan in total sales last year to 8.26 billion yuan by 2020.

The category is so new, and holds so many kinds of product, that even the consulting firms have not managed to measure it systematically.

Euromonitor does not track the newer categories, such as facial steamers and infusion devices. Executives at two beauty-device brands, NEWA and Mushu, both told QDaily that the industry is growing several times over. In the past two years the market has grown sevenfold, said Mushu founder Li Wang.

In August 2017, Tmall promoted beauty devices from a second-level category to a first-level one and moved them out of small appliances and under beauty. Tmall also ran an online-and-offline "Super Brand Day" for them — a measure of how much the platform cares about the category.

Since phones and tablets, the only new electronics category this hot, apart from beauty devices, may be the air purifier.

The Israeli brand Tripollar cleared 300 million yuan in sales in its second year in China. ReFa is popular enough with Chinese consumers that its parent company is preparing to go public. And the Swedish personal-care brand Foreo, built on silicone, saw its hit silicone cleansing brush, the Luna, grow more than 500% worldwide in 2017.

Startups such as Foreo and Clarisonic opened the market. Big companies such as L'Oréal, and the medical-aesthetics firm Keyiren, came in by buying small ones. They widened both the distribution and the pool of potential buyers.

Because the devices sit where cosmetics meet home appliances, companies of every stripe can join in. Some come from medical-aesthetics services or equipment, such as Keyiren (an American company) and China's Ouhua Meike. The domestic appliance brand POVOS has launched a facial steamer; Lexy, a vacuum-cleaner maker, has moved into small personal-care appliances.

Then there are the big international cosmetics groups. Clinique, SK-II and Innisfree all sell cleansing or infusion devices. So do celebrity labels: Madonna's MDNA SKIN and Fan Bingbing's Fan Beauty.

The idea is more than 30 years old, but social networks turned it into demand

Beauty devices are not a new market. Panasonic sold a facial steamer in Japan in the 1980s; the first Clarisonic cleansing brush appeared in 2004; that same year the Japanese company Ya-Man launched a photo-ion beauty device and entered the beauty small-appliance business.

What turned the devices from a weak want into a strong one was social media.

On a timeline, the first signs of the rise show up around 2011 and 2012, as brands were founded: ReFa, built on microcurrent, released its first product in 2009, and older brands were already taking off. Clarisonic began selling well in the United States after Oprah Winfrey recommended it; at the end of 2011 L'Oréal Group bought it.

In China the first important date is 2013, when both Foreo and Clarisonic formally entered the market. Consumers were already discussing the devices on social media before that, buying them through daigou personal shoppers or overseas sites. "Miracle face-washing gadget" became a hot Baidu search term in 2014, proof that the category had registered with consumers and that more of them were looking it up on their own.

Those were also the years when a whole wave of social platforms was founded or came into its own. Instagram, built on photos, started in 2011; in China, WeChat was born the same year (before the personal sellers and daigou moved in), and Weibo was at its peak. Two years later came Xiaohongshu, part beauty community, part shop.

Social media and e-commerce grew together, and beauty devices found their moment. The category suits both: it sells well online and travels well through social networks.

They cost more than cosmetics and carry at least some technology, which makes them what the industry calls a high-involvement product.

That means a great deal of teaching before the sale. The sonic technology Clarisonic and Foreo use is hardly a breakthrough today — dental care had it long ago — but brands still have to explain to buyers why it works and why it is safe.

Still harder are the technologies that border on medical aesthetics, such as the multi-polar radiofrequency that NEWA and Tripollar lead with. "What is RF, and why does it feel so mild on the face?" Gao Chen, who runs the device business at Shanghai Yimei Beauty, NEWA's China operator, says that is the sort of thing they constantly have to "educate" women about.

"Can it get wet? Can I keep my earrings on? Can I use it with braces? Can I use it while pregnant?" Those, Gao says, are the questions buyers ask. Selling a beauty device, she reckons, costs more in promotion than selling an ordinary cosmetic such as lipstick.

The decision also takes longer, because buyers spend more time reading and comparing. There is certainly plenty to "look into": ultrasound, LED light, radiofrequency, microcurrent, plus terms like dermis and epidermis, thrown around until no one follows them (knowing what the word means still tells you nothing about your face). Convincing someone it works takes more than one advertisement.

Li Wang of Mushu told QDaily that conversion on the day an ad runs is low. "We find they usually look at the product a second and a third time before they finally decide to buy."

The same happens in stores. "The beauty sales staff tell us that some customers look once, don't buy, and hesitate. That person may come back; on the second or third visit she checks whether anything new has arrived. It doesn't close on the first visit," Li said.

Jun, who works in IT in Beijing, told me she bought her ReFa two months after she first came across it. Part of the reason was the price.

What does the persuading, over and over, is no longer the advertising on a department store's ground floor. It is the influencers on social networks.

"All of our marketing is online, really," Gao Chen said. The women NEWA targets, aged 20 to 35 in first- and second-tier cities, live on Weibo, Xiaohongshu and the like, and they buy more and more of their makeup online. Half of NEWA's marketing budget goes to buying traffic, on Taobao's Zhitongche paid search and elsewhere.

Search "beauty device" on those platforms and you find a flood of reviews, recommendations, photos and videos. Word of mouth and advertising are tangled together, hard to tell apart.

Gao believes women are easily moved by recommendations from the people around them, and that beauty devices work much the way beauty as a whole works. "What you're going after is the consumer's experience, the thing that moves her," she said. Social marketing is what does the moving.

The other half of NEWA's marketing budget goes to beauty bloggers and key opinion leaders. The fashion blogger Becky Li and the beauty blogger Junping the Great Demon King have both worked with the brand.

Lipstick or beauty device, influencers are unavoidable; the democratization of information channels has remade the beauty business. More and more shoppers take their cues from influencers and KOLs. Unlike celebrities, who stand above them, influencers feel like ordinary people — "partners in solving a problem."

Past a certain point, though, the brands still sign celebrities. Madonna, Ruby Lin and Ni Ni have all shown off ReFa products, and ReFa recently made Fan Bingbing its ambassador. Mushu signed Ady An; Clarisonic has Little S and Zhong Chuxi.

The logic behind that is different. The economist Steven Landsburg observed long ago that nobody really believes celebrities use what they endorse; endorsement works because it proves the company can afford a celebrity — no different, at bottom, from a bank putting up an imposing building.

A fashion KOL using the device on camera works another way. It lets the viewer picture herself doing it: use this, and I will look like that.

Watching a review online and buying on the spot, skipping the store altogether, is now a habit for some shoppers.

Online sales carry most of the category. Clarisonic makes 70% of its sales online; the domestic brand Mushu is at roughly the same share; for NEWA, about 80% of Chinese sales come from the internet.

That is far above beauty as a whole. Bain & Company puts online at just 25% of cosmetics sales — already much higher than everyday household and personal-care goods, or luxury.

Most of these brands also carry few products, which suits online selling, and selling online spares them the cost of stocking stores at scale.

Fear of "early aging" has made young Chinese women the main users

In China, the buyers are mostly young women living and working in first- and second-tier cities.

They are far younger than buyers abroad. Take a massage or radiofrequency device: the same product is sold overseas to mature women over 40, while in China it aims at an age bracket 10 to 15 years lower. You can see it in the models and the ambassadors.

Ever since someone coined the phrase "early aging," the marketing of women's personal-care products has held on to it. Brands and beauty bloggers alike will tell you a woman should start fighting aging at 25. Behind the boom lie young women's anxiety about growing old and their longing to be beautiful. "Chinese women at this age love beauty too much. The attention they pay to every detail of their own face is extremely, extremely high," Gao Chen said.

The pitch works. Wang Zhen, chairman of Bijie Cleaning Technology, Ya-Man's general distributor in China, said in an interview that Ya-Man's buyers in Japan are mostly 35 to 40 and older, while in China the early adopters are 20 to 35, and the customer base even includes university and high school students.

They keep getting younger. Sun Ling, a marketing specialist at NEWA, told me the average buyer was 26 a couple of years ago, and that the number is trending down.

Kitty, a student in Guangzhou, is one case. She is 19, and bought hers after trying a friend's Foreo. She uses a NuFace as well, to slim her face, she says.

Kiko, 26, works in design in Hefei. She bought a Luna cleansing brush, a ReFa microcurrent roller and a Tripollar radiofrequency device, and uses all three together. "I just don't want to get old. I want my skin to stay good," she told QDaily.

Another line of the sales pitch echoes the one used for thousand-yuan skincare: buying a beauty device, or an expensive cream, is an investment in your looks.

That fits the fact that high-end beauty has a younger audience in China than elsewhere.

Kantar's consumer beauty panel found in 2016 that 20- to 29-year-olds had become the main buyers of cosmetics, and that their appetite for high-end brands far exceeds that of other age groups. The industry's own moves show it: SK-II signed Leah Dou; Guerlain took Yang Yang; Estée Lauder chose Yang Mi and Wang Kai — all aimed at the young.

People born in the 1980s and 1990s think about spending in a completely different way from the generations before them. They grew up while wealth was growing fast; they part with money more readily, save less, and have richer parents. China's luxury buyers, too, are younger than those in Europe and the United States.

Digital marketing lets the brands aim at this group precisely. Besides being willing to spend, they are digital natives.

Unlike other beauty products, devices need more tending of the customer after the sale. Most brands sell matching skincare: some insist the device be used only with their own products (Tripollar and NEWA), others merely recommend it (Foreo and Ya-Man).

So pushing customers to keep using the thing matters. It is also how the companies keep earning.

"A beauty device gathers dust easily, so you need someone to push you, like a personal trainer," Gao Chen said.

Now that they are hot, both dearer and cheaper models will multiply

Behind the market's growth is a shift in spending, from consumables and things bought to show off toward durable goods.

In the past two years, the consumption upgrade has reached the durable-goods stage. In 2016 and 2017, China's GDP per capita was roughly where America's was around 1975 and Japan's around 1980. At that point growth in non-durables slows, the upgrade in durables — cars, appliances — becomes more visible, and spending on services takes a larger share.

"Treating yourself well" no longer stops at eating well, buying more clothes or carrying a luxury bag. It now reaches into the home and the body.

Among household and personal-care products, robot vacuums, smart toilet seats, water flossers and washer-dryers — none of them necessary, all of them durable — have sold well once they were marketed well and aimed at the right people.

When the Chinese market was just starting in 2013, prices were high: even an entry-level product cost 800 to 1,000 yuan. The category was new enough that buyers were not yet sensitive to price.

As the market widens, the range of prices will come down. Guotai Securities thinks there is room for mid-range devices at around 100 yuan.

"I think within two years prices will stretch, spreading out from both ends," Gao Chen said. She expects more home devices at tens or a hundred yuan, and more above 10,000.

Shanghai Yimei is considering bringing in a brand cheaper than NEWA. Foreo already sells an entry-level product for a little over 200 yuan. At the other end, Mushu, whose products mostly sell for 200 to 500 yuan, plans a premium line above 1,000.

Can a beauty device become something everyone owns several of, the way they own lipsticks? Hard to say. People in the trade describe the buying as trying something new. Keeping the heat up, and stretching the life of a brand or a product, remains an open question.

The first hit, Clarisonic, is already fading. Global online searches for it have fallen steadily since 2014 — exactly ten years after its first product. In 2016 it began cutting staff at its US headquarters, and L'Oréal noted in its results that the brand's value had been impaired. Early this year, Foreo overtook it on Google search.

How far Foreo can go is also a question, since its technology is not hard to copy — nor is most of the category's. Cleansing brushes built on silicone and vibration keep multiplying, from the Korean brand Innisfree and the Chinese brands Kingdom and Mushu among others.

Plenty of people in the business still think there are many more buyers to be won.

"Perception outweighs fact"

For all the technology involved, the effect of most of these devices is disputed — you only have to read the reviews. Skin has always answered to many things at once: heredity, how you live, what you eat, how much you move, what you put on your face. You could say that beauty and skincare are a kind of folk metaphysics to begin with.

Last year a post that took a ReFa apart, piece by piece reached Weibo's trending list. The writer concluded that the product cost little to make, used simple technology, and was not worth its four-figure price. What is interesting is the replies: many buyers refused to accept it. "Maybe the one they took apart was a fake." "It works if you use it long enough." "So there's a brand premium — what of it? I enjoy using it."

"Perception outweighs fact," said Li Wang of Mushu. That sums up the whole beauty-device business, and perhaps the beauty business entire.

Trailing behind these fuzzy ideas, the category keeps growing busier.

Midea, the small-appliance brand, recently attached names like "soft-water beauty device" and "skin-cleansing instrument" to products that look like the kitchen water purifiers it used to sell. A.O. Smith has done something similar.

Whether or not any of it works, more and more products will arrive under the name of the beauty device.

At the interviewees' request, Jun, Kiko and Kitty are pseudonyms.

Images from Visualhunt \ unsplash \ brand Weibo accounts or Tmall stores