China Personal Care H1 2025: The Shift to Content Commerce

Introduction#

Content-led commerce has become one of the main channels for personal care in China. In MAT2025 a large and growing part of online body care and hair care sales went through content-led marketplaces, where shoppers discover products in short videos and live sessions and often buy them in the same session. Body care sales reached CN¥ 65.1 billion in MAT2025, up 27.0% YoY, and hair care sales reached CN¥ 51.9 billion, up 17.9% YoY.

We believe this is one of the fastest changes in how Chinese consumers buy everyday goods in recent years. For brands that still treat content platforms as a supplementary marketing channel, the data suggests that by MAT2025 content-led commerce had become a primary sales channel, with its own way of leading consumers from discovering a product to buying it.

This analysis looks at why personal care suits content-led commerce and what drives body care growth, and then at what this means for brands that sell personal care through several channels in China.

Why Content-Led Commerce Suits Personal Care#

The core mechanics of content-led commerce, which are short-video discovery, algorithmic distribution and live selling built into the same app, suit products whose appeal depends on demonstrating how they feel, smell and perform.

Moojing's data shows what drives the personal care purchase decision. In body care, scent accounts for 50.2% of product evaluation buzz, by a wide margin the largest single dimension, and in hair care fragrance nearly matches efficacy, at 36.8% against 38.4%. Texture, how a formulation feels and visible results after application are the other important dimensions. None of these is easy to convey on a static product listing with a photograph and bullet-point claims. All of them can be shown in a 60-second video or a live session in which a host applies the product and describes the experience as they use it.

Content-led commerce is therefore well suited to sensory product categories. A fragrance-retaining shower gel can be sold by showing how it is applied and how its foam looks, with the presenter describing the scent in the vocabulary of fine fragrance, in a short video that the algorithm shows to users who have already watched body care content. On a search-led marketplace, by comparison, the shopper usually arrives already intending to buy, finds the product listing and judges the product on text and static images.

We believe this fit between the product and the format means that the growth of personal care sales through content-led commerce is likely to last, since consumers' habits of discovering products are moving further towards content.

Body Care: Monthly Sales and the Promotional Calendar#

Monthly body care sales follow the main promotional calendar. They reached a record CN¥ 7.15 billion in November 2024, driven by the Double 11 shopping festival, and the June peak of CN¥ 5.26 billion reflects the 6.18 mid-year festival. Live selling has become an important part of how brands drive impulse purchases during these festivals.

Body care's MAT2025 sales of CN¥ 65.1 billion, up 27.0% YoY, grew considerably faster than hair care's CN¥ 51.9 billion (+17.9% YoY). We believe body care grew faster partly because its main purchase driver, scent and sensory experience, suits discovery through content, while choosing a hair care product involves more evaluation of ingredients and efficacy, which many shoppers still do through search.

Social media data supports this reading. Body care discussion reached 3.69 million posts in MAT2025, up 131.9% YoY, which is more than double the previous year, while hair care discussion was essentially flat at 2.92 million posts (-1.2% YoY). We believe the growth in body care content and the growth in body care sales feed each other, because more content leads to more discovery and more sales, and higher sales give creators a reason to make more content.

Two Ways of Reaching Personal Care Buyers#

For brand managers deciding where to invest, search-led marketplaces and content-led marketplaces reach buyers in different ways, and the difference matters more than any single sales figure.

On search-led marketplaces, success depends on search visibility, pay-per-click advertising and promotional discounts during the major shopping festivals. The consumer arrives with a defined intent, searching for a specific product type, so brand investment goes mainly into capturing demand that already exists, and brands compete on relevance, price and promotional mechanics for consumers who are already ready to buy.

In content-led commerce, the main thing a brand gets for its investment is new demand. A consumer watching body care content may not have opened the app intending to buy shower gel, but a convincing 60-second demonstration of a fragrance-retaining shower gel can create that intent. This is particularly valuable in categories such as body care, where many consumers do not have a strong existing brand preference. A consumer who discovers a new body care brand through a video and buys it in the app in the same session is acquired in a very different way from one who searches for "body lotion" on a search-led marketplace.

For brand strategy, this means marketing investment has to be divided between fulfilling demand, through search and promotional mechanics, and creating demand, through content production, KOL partnerships and live selling. We believe the MAT2025 data suggests that the balance is moving towards demand creation, as more consumers first come across personal care products through content.

The Consumers Behind Personal Care's Move to Content#

The demographic profile of personal care's social media audience shows which consumers are driving this change. Women account for 85.8% of personal care social media engagement in MAT2025, up from 79.3% in MAT2024, a shift of 6.5 percentage points in one year. Residents of Tier 1 cities account for 44.2% of the audience, and Tier 1 and New Tier 1 cities together account for over 70%.

Consumers under 30 are a growing part of this audience. The 21-25 age bracket rose from 15.0% to 17.4% of the personal care social media audience, and the 26-30 bracket rose to 22.2%, so consumers aged 21-30 accounted for approximately 40% of personal care social media engagement in MAT2025. This group has grown up online, uses short-video platforms as a main source of content and product discovery, and is willing to buy directly through content-linked commerce.

We believe the concentration of personal care engagement among young, urban women in Tier 1 cities helps explain why content-led commerce has grown so quickly in this category. The algorithms that distribute content are designed to show it to engaged users of this kind, and more content then leads to more purchases in the app.

Strategic Implications for Channel Planning#

We see three strategic priorities in the data for personal care brands operating in China.

The first is to rebalance channel investment. We believe brands that put most of their China commerce budget into search optimisation and promotional mechanics risk missing the growing number of consumers who discover personal care through content, and that under-investing in content and live selling means sales forgone. The right channel split will vary by brand and category, but the data points to more investment in content-led commerce.

The second is to treat content strategy as commerce strategy, because in content-led commerce the content is itself the main sales operation. Brands need real content production capabilities, meaning a steady supply of short videos and live sessions that show the sensory qualities of their products, particularly fragrance. We believe the brands best placed in this channel are those that build teams and KOL networks able to produce frequent, high-quality content in the sensory language their target consumers respond to.

The third is to develop products for the occasions that content is made about. The social media data shows that body care usage scenarios have expanded well beyond at-home routines, with gift-giving buzz up 123.2% YoY, business travel up 122.0% and dating up 172.8%. These occasions suit content-led discovery, because a body care video built around a date has a story to tell and is easy to share. Brands that develop products positioned for these emotional occasions, and create content around them, can gain both social media engagement and the premium prices that occasion-based purchasing supports.

Conclusion#

We believe the move of personal care discovery and purchasing towards content-led commerce is a lasting change in consumer behaviour, and one that is still gathering pace. Body care's 27.0% growth in MAT2025 came partly from how well the category's sensory nature, and especially its emphasis on fragrance, suits content-led selling. The same movement in hair care, a category with more complex buying criteria, suggests that the change reaches beyond a single category.

Brands that invest now in content production and live selling are likely to see those investments build on each other as more consumers discover personal care products this way.

For the full channel and category analysis, download the H1 2025 China Personal Care Market Report.