What People in Different Areas Pay in Pursuit of Beauty?

Although the love of beauty is universal, due to the different demands of different regions and different races for "beauty", people's consumption behavior also has a very obvious selective preference: Asian women's consumption of facial skin care is 70% higher than the global average level.  African-American women, on the other hand, invest heavily in their hair, spending nine times as much on hair products as the rest of the population to keep their hair straight and smooth. Although the focus is different, the basic principle is the same: the more you care about something, the more you are willing to pay for it, hoping to achieve the most ideal appearance in your heart.

However, in cosmetics and personal care products, a market that lacks effective supervision, this sentence can be almost directly translated as: the more you care about what, the more likely you are to become a victim of information asymmetry in this type of product.

Whitening Products Trap

Not only Asian girls, other dark-skinned races are also whitening lovers, including Indian, Middle Eastern, and even African (light brown African girls are more popular than dark brown or black skin).

Everyone knows that mercury is a toxic heavy metal. However, high concentrations of mercury can prevent the production of melanin. If it is added to skin care products, it can achieve a "quick whitening" effect when used on the skin. Therefore, this low-cost and quick-acting method is often used by illegal traders. Not only in China, the production and circulation of whitening products with excessive mercury content in illegal channels around the world is a cancer that has been repeatedly banned for years.

Both Chinese national standards and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearly stipulate that the mercury content in skin care products shall not exceed 1 mg/L or 1 mg/kg. And in the whitening products that exceed the standard, how high can mercury be? The answer is 40,000 times more than the standard level . This data is the result of a random inspection of whitening products in 10 cities in China in 2012. Among 112 whitening products that were spot- checked, nearly a quarter of mercury content exceeded the standard .