Competitive Authenticity: Chinese Beauty Influencers Leverage the Hashtag #ReconcileWithPlainFace to Intensify Their Rivalries

Abstract: In China’s complex and layered digital landscape, women influencers are redefining Asian beauty ideals and challenging traditional narratives. This study investigates the uses and implications of the hashtag “# YuSuyanHejie / #ReconcileWithPlainFace.” Originating on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, this hashtag explicitly promotes a makeup-free appearance. As a piece of marketing rhetoric, the hashtag is reminiscent of the recent strategic shift by Western brands from featuring unrealistic, “flawless” models to promoting “real” beauty that features “average,” everyday women. Increasingly, Chinese influencers now present viewers with makeup-free, “authentic” profile images that challenge traditional and repressive beauty norms. Ironically, such claims seem to intensify, rather than relax, the incredibly fierce competition that already characterizes the online beauty community. Through digital ethnography, this paper examines the interactions between Chinese influencers and their followers to analyze the construction of, and tensions within, the dissonant concept of competitive authenticity. This study contributes to an understanding of gender, labor, and “authenticity” within China's digital economy and demonstrates the ways in which influencers weigh self-representation against both commercial incentives and societal expectations.