This paper explores the cultural politics of the cosmetological industry in China via the growing entrenchment of what I call fixed facial templates: the practice of producing near-identical faces via surgery, treatments and tweakments. I zero in on one hyper-dominant template: that of the so-called “internet celebrity face” or wanghonglian网红脸. Ubiquitous across China’s social media ecosystem, female wanghong project a persona which is appealing but also aesthetically exacting: groomed, cute, immaculate. Although this is a persona shaped by total habitus – physique, style, mannerisms, diction, vocal tone – it’s also powerfully centered on the face, or rather on a fixed facial template whose main traits are a pointed chin, straight brows, double eyelids, and a high-bridged nose. In this talk, I explore the spread of this facial template and the volatile social reactions that it stirs. To do this, I close-read a corpus of cosmetic surgery diaries posted on major cosmetological apps from 2017-2021, demonstrating that these image-text testimonials are marked by powerfully split feelings about fixed facial templates. People crave “internet celebrity face”, but many also openly despise it – and I argue that this tension is key to the power that the vast cosmetological industry leverages over its subjects. Pushing this point further, I go on to unpick the relationship between art history and the fixed facial template, showing that many artists across time and space have produced aesthetic visions of the golden ratio which set down hard ground rules for female beauty. These older practices of portraiture, I suggest, have a great deal to tell us about the beauty premium in the contemporary moment. I conclude by exploring “internet celebrity face” beyond the operating theatre, as a pervasive biopolitical visual grammar performed increasingly for the camera, and thence for the online world, via makeovers, filters, and beauty apps which “adjust” selfies to fit cookie cutter facial patterns. As our social universe is ever more mediated by the smartphone and its camera, the relationship between visual culture and our lived experience of the human face is becoming increasingly coercive.

Speaker’s Bio:

Margaret Hillenbrand is a professor of modern Chinese literature and visual culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in contemporary China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.