Carefully, a salesman daubed the woman's bald spot with a cylinder of "Super Million Hair." Minutes later, with the help of a froth of "enhancement fibers," Huang Bing had what looked like a full head of jet-black hair.
"Does it look all right?" the 43-year-old insurance agent asked a gathered crowd, gently patting her new synthetic 'do. Everyone murmured approval.
Huang was one of thousands who streamed into Beijing's exhibition center Friday during the China International Hair and Beauty Festival, an over-the-top splash of goods from makeup and hair potions to steam spas the size of jet skis.
The four-day event offers a sharply focused snapshot of China's women -- and the pressures and products offered by a fast-changing world.
"Before, Chinese people only cared about beauty from the neck up. Now you have to worry about your body, your skin, your hands, your legs, your toes," Huang said.
Onlookers watched openmouthed as freckles disappeared and tattoos appeared. Some shoved their way toward full-body massages, facials and haircuts; others inhaled aromatherapy and perfume samples. Cleavage-enhancing bras and breast-augmenting gel pads drew stares.
"Our culture is opening up, and we're opening up too," said Liu Wei, a 21-year-old design student with fuschia sunglasses and blond-streaked hair. "It's vogue to be fashionable."
The evidence is everywhere.
Across Beijing, billboards trumpet beauty products, particularly those that make Chinese skin look whiter -- and more Western. Later this month, an international fashion show hits Tiananmen Square, where the countenance of the decidedly anti-glamorous Mao Zedong (
China's increasingly frantic pursuit of beauty signifies "Westernization, globalization and modernization for Asian women in society," said Cristina Pieraccini, a professor at the State University of New York in Oswego, New York, who specializes in how the media affects women and children.
Wang Ping, the Minnesota-based author of Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, suggests the increased focus on beauty is "the effort from the masses to build and consolidate a positive image of China."
"Fashion is a little tyrant who likes to coerce people to conform to its whimsical standard, and people often bow to it with much willingness and delight," Wang said. "The Chinese are no exception. The question is, whose standard is it?"
For more than 1,000 years, the Chinese standard was a maiden with bound feet who was slender and fragile -- what Wang calls "the willowy gait and lotus steps."
After the 1949 Communist takeover, and especially during Mao's 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, the norm changed. Women were recruited for all jobs. Clothes became unisex as most donned army uniforms or shapeless blue Mao suits and cotton shoes.
In the 1980s, as China engaged the international community, Hong Kong and Japan -- and, later, the US -- provided inspiration for women's body images. Now, with the growth of China's economy and national pride, "the Chinese fashion trend is bound to ... seek more diversity and individuality," Wang said.
Also part of the Beijing festival, which ended yesterday, was a national hairdressing competition. Stylists took to the stage to snip, fluff, tease, curl and spritz their way through eight categories.
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