The latest data from Tmall, Alibaba's online shopping platform, showed that more than 3,000 cosmetics manufacturers have opened flagship stores on the platform over the past year, of which nearly 80 percent were Chinese new brands.

China is currently the world's second largest cosmetics market. Young Chinese people, who have built increasingly strong identification with Chinese culture, are showing ever more acceptance of domestic cosmetics brands.

Studies from the Ministry of Commerce reveal that Chinese people who were born between 1990 and 2010, making up 340 million or nearly a quarter of the country's population, tend to be less fixated with international brands, as well as are more likely to embrace new brands, experiment with unique tastes, and opt for online shopping. This has bolstered the rise of domestic cosmetics brands.

East China's Zhejiang province, which is home to the second largest number of cosmetics manufacturers and the strongest e-commerce industry among Chinese provinces, is a great beneficiary of this consumer trend.

"Zhejiang has built a relatively complete industrial chain for cosmetics. The cities of Hangzhou and Huzhou are home to upper- and middle-class skincare manufacturers. Yiwu, a county-level city of Jinhua, has brought together exporters of make-up products. Shaoxing is a manufacturing base of cosmetics materials and packages. Moreover. Hangzhou is also home to thousands of marketing firms of cosmetics brands," said Zhang Yan, director of the Zhejiang Health Products & Cosmetics Industry Association.

Florasis, a cosmetics brand founded in the provincial capital of Hangzhou in 2017, surpassed 3 billion yuan ($467.7 million) in sales in 2020. It entered the Japan market in early March.

Hou Jun, chairman of Proya, another Hangzhou-based cosmetics brand, told reporters that the company's online sales had an annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent over the past few years.

A worker assembles products on a production line in the Huzhou plant of Proya Cosmetics Co. [Photo//zj.zjol.com.cn]

"If we look at the entire cosmetics market in the world, we would find that no matter if it is in the United States, France, Japan, or South Korea, the most popular cosmetics product in any price range there is a domestic brand. There is no reason we will not see the same case in China," a Chinese venture capitalist said. He also added that domestic cosmetics brands with deep insights into Chinese consumers and market trends are seizing on a systematic opportunity for explosive growth.

"With the rise of living standards, Chinese consumers are gradually unleashing their demand for beauty make-up products, which has been proved by the fact that most domestic cosmetics brands are based in prosperous coastal regions like Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Jiangsu," said Jin Litai, dean of the School of International Studies at Wenzhou Medical University and longtime observer of the cosmetics market.

Last year, the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Economy and Information, as well as the Zhejiang Medical Products Administration jointly issued the Zhejiang Cosmetics Industry's High-Quality Development Plan (2020-2025), setting the goal for the province's cosmetics industry to exceed 200 billion yuan in sales and take up at least a quarter of the market share for domestic brands by 2025.