Did You Also Pick Up a Pile of “Buy Buy Buy” Knowledge Without Noticing? | 100 Big Questions About Life

A handbook of consumerist jargon — it’s all on the test.

Run a quick mental search through your everyday vocabulary. It takes almost no effort to notice how many new words about buying you already know.

For instance: without using the word “purchase” to describe buying something, how many substitutes can you come up with? “Place an order,” “chop off my hand,” “buy buy buy,” “empty the shopping cart” — you can name at least three.

You may not remember a single phone number outside your family, yet somehow you have picked up the secret codenames of a hundred products — Rolex’s “Green Water Ghost,” Dior’s true-red lipstick “999” — and you are unlikely to mistake “Fairy Water” for a video-game item.

If you know beauty brands a little better, you can pull “bean-paste red,” “period red” and “Death Barbie Pink” out of what looks to everyone else like a single shade of red; you can reel off brands’ down-to-earth nicknames the way a crosstalk performer reels off a menu — Dior the “Carving,” LV the “Donkey,” La Mer the “Spicy Girl,” YSL the “Poplar Grove” ...

Recommending something good to someone is “Amway-ing” it; spending money in a game is “krypton gold”; the fashion bloggers who move the most product are “KOLs.” All routine by now. Oh, and “carrying goods” is a new word too. We use them so easily that, unless you watch yourself, it is hard to talk about anything to do with buying without them.

That our era has so many new words about buying is not a fact to take for granted. When people can describe and discuss one class of things in a whole new vocabulary, something has changed — and the new thing has already taken a fairly prominent place in our lives.

Consumer life today looks nothing like it did thirty, or even fifteen, years ago. Take daily necessities. We used to buy whatever the supermarket had: Rejoice for shampoo, Bee & Flower for conditioner, and now and then a hotel toothbrush our parents brought home from a business trip. Nobody imagined using an electric toothbrush a hundred times pricier than a soft-bristled Colgate. Now it is a staple of the refined life, voted “the No. 1 product for improving your quality of life” in our surveys more than once.

In an age of scarcity, what we bought was a basic necessity, a specific function. Then industrial society turned out goods in abundance, and the urban middle class piled up small sums with nowhere to go — no apartment they could afford, no car license plate they could win in the lottery. People stopped being satisfied with buying to meet basic needs and began paying for added value instead: for design, craft and brand stories (some of it wildly overstated), and for the vicarious psychological massage that comes with the act of buying. Sure, I still can’t afford Hermès, but my toothbrush is the Hermès of toothbrushes and my pillow is the Hermès of pillows, so how far can I be from the Hermès of life’s winners? Ah, the ultimate indulgence. Ah, that wonderful feel.

The beneficiaries are brands like Dyson, which exist to serve demand at the top. Dyson has convinced a large group of urban young people earning around 10,000 yuan a month that 3,000 yuan for a hair dryer is still a bargain. What you pay for is not just a tool for drying hair; it is a piece of “black tech,” a benchmark of the refined life, a sedative for hair-loss anxiety (which is really the pressure of the age).

Another clear change: shopping guides went from optional to indispensable. Not the TV shopping hosts yelling “was 998 yuan, now only 98!” while hawking Olympic commemorative gold-inlaid jade, but guide platforms like Xiaohongshu and Smzdm (“What’s Worth Buying”), and fashion KOLs like Mr. Bags and Becky Li.

They look like people who see through trends, who have a ready standard for what is good and what is junk, and who keep exactly the right distance from your life — not so far above you as to be out of reach, not so close as to be copied outright. You may not have their looks or their money (sponsorships), but it is easy to accept the samples of the good life they display, to accept the brand-new needs they invent, and then to piece those together into a personal need that pretends to have come from you.

The needs keep getting finer. A beauty blogger who looks ten years younger than she is can always convince you that making do with a face cream and an eye cream is still a crude, primitive way to live — that every inch of your skin has a specialist product waiting for it. Your face looks fine and still reads as old? Probably too many neck lines; why not try a neck cream? Even the soles of your feet, which nobody ever sees, deserve the tender care of a foot mask. By the same logic, an electric toothbrush alone can’t be enough: you need mouthwash on hand at all times, and have you stocked up on a water flosser? What about the wall-mounted washing machine just for underwear? How did you survive the plum-rain season without one?

A whole set of tastes and values is quietly planted in your head: upgrading is compulsory, covering every base is the bare minimum, no amount of refinement is too much, and even chasing “effortless” doesn’t mean letting things go — it means working hard and leaving no trace of the effort ... None of this works only by painting a picture of the life you want; sometimes it works through anxiety. Beautiful people all stick to their body-sculpting routines, so what excuse do you have for not working out, for not striving for “ab lines” and a “bikini bridge” — unless you want to be the laziest castoff of the age.

Much of the buying vocabulary that has become everyday speech was coined to describe exactly these changes — the new system of taste, the shopping-guide chain that now decides so much, and a way of consuming built on what a purchase means: “the same one she has,” “top-tier Big V,” “topping up the faith.” Nor is there any shortage of coinages that inherit business’s tradition of overstatement: “empowerment,” “black tech,” “craftsman spirit.”

Beyond these widely shared new words there is buying jargon used only inside particular circles. An article in the Chinese edition of T Magazine, the New York Times’s style magazine, “The Faces of Consumerism: Which One Have You Seen Clearly?”, explains that when a group formed around shared values and shared buying interests matures, it develops a body of knowledge everyone takes part in producing, and jargon only insiders can understand — as if a utopia had been suspended in mid-air. What matters most is that everyone inside is willing to pay for it, and gets a sense of worth in return.

The jargon of one circle organized around one class of goods does not carry over to another. In a jargon quiz we ran covering sneakers, watches, beauty products and other circles, people from different circles judged the difficulty of the questions completely differently: some readers said the cosmetics questions hit a blind spot, while others sailed through most of it and were undone only by “cigarette-run condition,” a beginner’s term from the secondhand sneaker world.

To help you and me keep our heads as best we can while consumerism carries us along, the QDaily Research Lab has put together a “buy buy buy” jargon handbook, covering both the broad changes above and the insider jargon — 27 terms in four categories. It’s all on the test.

1. Eight Essential Moves for Fancy Spending

“Chop Off Your Hand” (duoshou) — Originally from one of life’s three great illusions, “if I buy one more thing I’ll chop off my hand,” the phrase later became a plain synonym for “buy buy buy.” It is also the source of the urban legend that buying too much turns you into a thousand-armed Guanyin. The face of the term is generally agreed to be Heshen in the TV drama 《铁齿铜牙纪晓岚》 (Iron Teeth, Bronze Teeth: Ji Xiaolan), since Lord He’s classic meme caption reads: “why can’t I keep this hand of mine under control?”

“Eating Dirt” (chitu) — A realistic account of your own finances, short for “so poor I can only eat dirt”; the modern version of “drinking the northwest wind.” It fits any state of blowing the budget. As a rule, the things worth eating dirt for are the ones that carry some special meaning for you: a new console game, merchandise to support your idol, a front-row ticket to a Guo Degang crosstalk show. So a young person today with no readiness to “eat dirt by the end of the month” has, you could say, no faith to speak of.

“Krypton Gold” (kejin) — From the Japanese kakin, originally buying virtual property — game items and the like — with real money. It has since picked up the negative sense of paying to take a shortcut. Because it comes loaded with anime and gaming associations, it mostly describes spending on virtual goods such as monthly passes and memberships. Games where you can’t get stronger without paying are therefore called “krypton-gold games” by players — the same mix of love and hate as “garbage game, ruining my youth, draining my money.”

“Topping Up the Faith” (xinyang chongzhi) — It began with Sony fanatics, and meant “my love for Sony has reached the level of faith.” It later spread to the fan circles of other brands: when fans buy phones, computers or games from the same brand for years, that is “topping up another round of faith.” Of course, since faith can be neither seen nor touched, the phrase also serves now and then as a polite version of “stupidity tax.”

“Bundled Allocation” (peihuo) — In everyday use it is the “now allocating your order” status you often see in shopping apps. In its advanced sense it is the in-store condition that “to buy a certain product, you must spend a certain amount on accessories at the same time.” That second sense belongs mostly to fashion and personal-shopper circles: “The SA (sales associate) at XX told me I could only get this bag with bundled allocation, so I turned around and had a personal shopper buy me one at double the price” — a seamless humblebrag.

“Knife” (dao) — A near-homophone of “dollar,” so it can stand in for US dollars; and because the image of a knife matches the motion of cutting a price, it also carries the sense of haggling. “Can knife” means the price is negotiable; “can small-knife” means you can round it down to the nearest whole number.

“Dragon-Slaying Saber” (tulongdao) — A staple term in secondhand circles, for an outrageous lowball offer: “they asked if I’d sell a 20,000-yuan item for 20.” It usually turns up at the end of a listing as “no Dragon-Slaying Saber wielders, please,” meaning roughly “don’t ask, the price is firm.” It can be shortened to “no dragon-slaying, please.”

“Planting Grass, Pulling Grass” (zhongcao, bacao) — A thoroughly stream-of-consciousness metaphor, in which “grass” is “the urge to buy, which springs back like wild grass in a spring wind.” “Planting grass” means “I’ve taken a liking to it, I want it”; “pulling grass” means “pulling that urge up by the roots.” But watch out: “pulling grass” has two opposite uses. If someone tells you “I pulled the grass on the pork-intestine noodles down the street,” they may mean “I finally tried it, and it was pretty good,” or “I heard someone got diarrhea from it, so I’m not going.” You have to read it in context.

2. The Modern Shopping Matchmaker and Its Vocabulary

KOL — Short for key opinion leader, a marketing term for an opinion leader in an industry: the front-line officer who strikes wherever the consumerist frenzy points. Brands trust them as the best value for money, as if a KOL had only to raise an arm and shout — even something like “look at this bitter melon, it’s sour and sweet at once” — for followers to buy in. (They won’t, apart from the paid commenters the KOL hired.)

“Top-Tier” (toubu) — The front-line officer with the biggest force and the strongest fighting power. Their word carries more weight than an ordinary KOL’s, and their ad rates are higher too. By the same logic there are “waist-tier Big Vs” and “leg-tier Big Vs” — and following this trend of naming people after body parts, could someone as invisible and weightless in the shopping world as me be called an “appendix Big V”?

“Carrying Goods” (daihuo) — A superpower best described as “whatever they use, you suddenly want to use too.” It is the ultimate test for a public figure today: those without it are weeded out by the market, while the gifted ones who wake up to the power gradually turn themselves into a dress-up avatar permanently stationed at the airport, there for consumers everywhere to study and copy.

“Fairy” (xiannv) — An upgrade on “beauty,” “dear” and “little sister,” one of the flattering terms merchants use for female shoppers. The classic form is “little fairy,” which covers age, looks and gender at once, works as self-description and as a compliment, and is extremely handy. Sadly, after overuse it has suffered the same severe semantic inflation as “beauty”: essentially every female consumer, and a fair number of well-groomed young men, now stands a chance of joining the ranks of the fairies at any moment. The one real obstacle may be weight — a chubby fairy does have more trouble ascending to heaven.

“Empty Bottles” (kongping) — Words like “works well,” “pretty” and “moisturizing” are now too pale to carry any weight. A skincare opinion leader has to display the year’s worth of empty bottles she has used up before she can make the point: I really did use this, and this budget La Mer really does fight oxidation / feel wonderful on the skin / do nothing at all. These days only “endless repurchase” catches the eye — a sign that the recommendation business has run out of tricks.

“Unboxing” (kaixiang) — A common way of showing off on electronics forums. Unboxing streamers are forever shooting their posts from every exquisite angle to make them look like a blockbuster, and sometimes it is dull enough that you secretly start hoping they picked up the wrong parcel — now that would be worth watching. Imagine: what should be the unboxing of a new DJI drone opens to reveal the box of tampons your partner ordered last week. Surprise!

3. Value-Added Labels That Basically Mean “Expensive”

“Cultural-Creative” (wenchuang) — Another shortcut by which a product raises its own value. Mugs with crude, even ghosted prints, canvas bags, phone cases, ugly fake-leather T-shirts — attach the two words “cultural-creative” and the price jumps three to five times. If it worked on people, I would put it on my résumé this instant.

“Morandi Colors” — A dignified palette with gray mixed in. Garish “A-Bao colors” reek of cheapness; Morandi colors ≈ understated luxury ≈ expensive.

“Empowerment” (funeng) — BAT — Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent — is a platform that “empowers” users with infinite possibility; a startup making tampons is likewise a company that “empowers” women: use our tampons and shed your period shame, become a Wonder Woman full of strength. The marketing is no smarter than the old ad for winged sanitary pads promising that once you put one on you could “roll around in bed however you like.” By the definition of Lucy Kellaway, a former Financial Times columnist, “empowerment” is standard business bullshit, hitting 2 of her 8 rules for manufacturing it: first, “don’t limit yourself to words that already exist in the dictionary”; second, “if what you have made is simple, be sure to rebrand it with a term nobody understands.” In short: when a startup uses the word, it is mystification passed along secondhand; when BAT manufactures it, the word is there to re-translate “capital control” — a full-marks performance in advanced business Chinese, which not only hides the smell of monopoly but successfully conjures the mercy of God creating the world, or Nüwa molding humankind.

“Immersive Experience” (chenjin tiyan) — A three-dimensional light show surrounding you on all four sides. Sometimes it is cruder than that: we put up a tent you can mess around in for a while. By that definition, your first immersive experience was the inflatable castle on the square back home.

“Black Tech” (heikeji) — Self-suggestion along the lines of “our business is solid, rich in technological DNA.” What it actually names are little handmade inventions that make an investor’s face go black on hearing about them: a 30-minute quick-dry hair cap, a talcum powder that fluffs your roots in one second, a “light magic” sunscreen cap that changes color under UV — a hater of the vocabulary world, dedicated to blackening the name of technology.

“Craftsman Spirit” (gongjiang jingshen) — Originally the idea of a craftsman working over his own product with care and pushing it towards perfection: a term about professional spirit. Now it is mainly a compulsory phrase for any product bent on becoming a bestseller: a term about professional bullshitting. John Patrick Leary, author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, argues that words like “craftsmanship” are in fact capital’s answer to countercultural criticism, meant to show that it can give workers some sense of purpose and autonomy inside what looks like mechanical daily labor. The most recent product to stand for the term is Xiaoguan Tea.

4. Just a Fraction of the Insider Passcodes (Add More in the Comments

“Carving” (diao) — Dior’s homegrown nickname. In the same spirit, LV is “Donkey Brand,” YSL is “Poplar Grove,” La Mer is “Wintersweet” ... With these deliberately down-to-earth folk names, consumers, in their lordly way, pull luxury brands off the altar and into the mud, and produce the feel of “oh, this luxury brand, I buy it all the time at the corner shop in my village.”

“Shade Number” (sehao) — The code for a lipstick color. If the ultimate answer to this world is 42, the matching ultimate question must be “what’s the shade number?” Because whether people are watching a vlog, a TV drama or even the Spring Festival Gala, they always care about one thing above all: that lip color looks great — what’s the number?

“Little X Bottle” (xiao x ping) — Friends who know skincare have an astonishing gift for art: color alone is enough for them to tell apart each brand’s flagship product. Helena Rubinstein’s little green bottle, Lancôme’s little black bottle, SK-II’s big red bottle — no trouble at all. Ask about the little gold bottle and they will name three different products on the spot, then ask you back whether you mean Anessa’s sunscreen, L’Oréal’s hair oil or Estée Lauder’s eye cream.

“Birth Mother to Oily Skin” (youpi qinma) — Oddly enough, “birth mother” usually describes a suffocating, off-key kind of maternal love when applied to actual mothers. Applied to how a skincare product feels in use, it means the opposite: care that thinks of everything, a product genuinely friendly and effective for skin as oil-prone as mine.

“Reissue” (fuke) — A reverse yardstick held up against a brand’s existing line: better foot feel, a much softer sole, design details that leave the regular version nowhere ... a magical thing that can single-handedly overrule a brand’s entire history of development.

“Cigarette-Run Condition” (mai yan chengse) — A vivid description of wear on secondhand sneakers: worn for no longer than it takes to “run downstairs for a pack of cigarettes.” Newer than “worn a few times, 80% new,” slightly more worn than “tried on once” — almost brand new. That said, you can’t rule out the less than scrupulous seller for whom “buying a pack of cigarettes” actually means “wore them across the compound in the rain, walked to the convenience store half a block away and back, then scrubbed the soles hard afterward.” Rounding generously, then, “cigarette-run condition” can be taken to mean roughly 90% new.

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya

*“100 Big Questions About Life” is a newly spun-off column. It follows those small-scale yet hugely important developments in modern life — the kind of topic you raise with friends by starting, “hey, have you noticed lately ...” Follow along.