The beauty market in China is particularly dynamic, full of its own regional trends and aesthetics, while championing domestic and global brands alike. Pragmatic and conscious consumers want to support both home-grown labels and niche ones from abroad. Ultimately, with increased concern over ingredients, they want products that align with their values and meet their demands.
The confidence that a product will deliver almost always comes from personal networks and expert voices on specialist digital platforms. Enter Beauty Evolution: the app that all beauty brands seeking to establish themselves in the Chinese market need to be on.
Founded in 2016 and now boasting a user base of over 10 million, the app provides three main pillars of information: product ingredients, how products affect different skin types, and user reviews. With a busy home interface, the app also packs in so much more, such as rankings of products by brand (domestic and international), category, ingredients, and even by skin type.
The rise of Beauty Evolution has also coincided with a new tribe of experts and tastemakers in the Chinese beauty space – “skintellectuals” (成分党), literally meaning “the ingredients party”, like a political party. Boasting such a dynamic user base and range of content, any beauty brand present in China should learn how the app can cater to their own marketing and community-building.
Ingredient Information
Beauty Evolution allows users to search for particular ingredients, delivering an array of products that contain what they’re looking for, including anything from essential oils to avocado. Ingredients have a safety rating based on a traffic light system, with a whole FAQ page explaining such ratings and what they mean.
While the app has an interface and content feed similar to other lifestyle apps, namely RED, the detail of information available on Beauty Evolution makes it rather text-heavy in terms of content. It’s frequented by serious beauty consumers and they want serious insights, brands need to reciprocate with transparency about their products and by sharing it in the relevant spaces on Chinese socials.
Skin Types
While plenty of apps curate content based on personal algorithms that accumulate over time, an app as specialist as Beauty Evolution asks users about their skin type from the off, allowing for targeted products and content as soon as possible.
Results driven by dermatological data and the fact that users voluntarily share this information allow them to feel like they are truly opting into data sharing, unlike other apps that are less explicitly geared towards commerce. Effective collaborations on Beauty Evolution allow brands to target not just millions of proactive consumers, but also those best suited to their products based on actual science.
User Reviews
China has seen the advent of a whole genre of apps focused on social commerce, with user-generated content reviewing products at their core, RED being the most iconic. Beauty Evolution is no different, and arguably provides more in-depth reviews of products than many apps.
While its content stream looks similar to RED, a feed brimming with images and thumbnails, individual post pages are very text-heavy, closer to WeChat articles in their attention to detail.
This is where the skintellectuals come in. Referring to genuine experts from the beauty industry who have become influencers in their own right, many now have audiences of several million across Chinese social media. Posts by major users on Beauty Evolution receive tens of thousands of views; skintellectual kenjijoel has almost 3m Weibo followers;
And on RED, the hashtag “scientific skincare skintellectuals” has been viewed over 52m times. Many users consult skintellectuals on Beauty Evolution because it is perceived to be beginner-friendly and health-conscious buyers can check ingredients quickly; pregnant women often consult the platform when concerned about products that may affect their baby.
Frank evaluations from these experts mean that users can access reliable information on products, whether it comes from brands or not. The onus then, is on beauty brands to be active on Beauty Evolution and similar social spaces, collaborate with expert tastemakers, and develop trust among conscious consumers in an age where natural products and transparency are valued above all else.
