China’s hair growth and scalp care market has moved a long way past shampoo. By 2023, the country’s hair care product market reached 620.9 billion yuan, up 3.4% year on year, and industry researcher iiMedia projects it will pass 691 billion yuan by 2025. Hair loss itself is no longer treated as a middle-age problem either.
A widely cited Daxue Consulting analysis puts the number of Chinese people dealing with hair loss above 250 million, roughly one in six. The average age of onset has dropped to just over 30, and people born after 1990 now make up close to 40% of the people seeking treatment. That shift changed who these brands need to talk to, and where.
I’m Olivier Verot, founder of GMA in Shanghai since 2012. I’ve watched foreign hair care brands treat this category as a beauty add-on and lose to domestic players who treat it as a medical concern, which is closer to how Chinese consumers actually see it.
Who is actually buying hair growth products in China
The audience is not one group. It splits roughly into three, and each one needs a different message.
- Women in their late 30s to 50s managing visible thinning after years of putting family and work first. They respond to reassurance and clinical-sounding proof, not hype.
- Highly educated professional women, roughly mid-30s to mid-40s, many working long hours in offices or labs. They read the ingredient list before they read the reviews.
- Women in their 20s and early 30s in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, dealing with stress-driven hair loss. They shop on their phones between meetings and want a visible result fast.
Inside the market in 2026
The competitive picture used to be simpler. Korean and Japanese import brands covered the premium end, a handful of Chinese heritage brands built on traditional medicine ingredients owned the mid-market, and Procter & Gamble and Unilever fought for share with mainstream FMCG lines. That map still holds directionally. The exact market share splits we could cite five years ago are old enough now that we won’t repeat them here: we couldn’t verify a current figure we’d trust, so we’re leaving it out rather than guessing.
What has changed is the framing. Scalp care is increasingly sold and bought as an extension of skincare, not haircare. iiMedia’s research on the scalp wellness segment also flags hair transplant demand shifting toward female consumers, away from the male-pattern-baldness clientele the clinics were originally built for. That’s a real change in who walks into a clinic or adds a serum to a morning routine, and it means product photography, spokesperson casting, even packaging color, need to follow skincare conventions rather than old pharmacy ones.
Build a reputation before you try to sell anything
Even a brand with strong recognition at home starts from zero in China. There is no Google, so a real Baidu presence matters more than most Western marketers expect. There is no WhatsApp and no Instagram: WeChat and Little Red Book carry that weight instead. A Chinese-language website, hosted in or near mainland China and built around Chinese visual expectations rather than a Western minimalist template, is step one. Without a credible e-reputation, sales stay at zero no matter how good the product is.
SEO and SEM still do the heavy lifting
Once the site is live, it has to rank. A solid Baidu SEO strategy starts with identifying the sector, the target audience and the keywords that actually convert, not the ones with the highest search volume. Baidu SEM adds two layers on top: Tuiguang, the search and display network equivalent to Google Ads, and Brand Zone, a mini-site format that sits at the very top of the results page. Most SEM campaigns we run for hair and scalp brands split budget between the two rather than betting everything on one.
Search is changing again, and this time it’s not Baidu
A growing share of Chinese consumers now ask an AI assistant directly instead of typing a search query. “Best product for thinning hair after 35” goes into DeepSeek or Doubao rather than into ten blue links on Baidu. These models answer by pulling from indexed content, forum threads and structured product data, not by ranking pages the way Baidu does. Getting cited by name inside that answer, what the industry now calls GEO, generative engine optimization, means writing content that answers the question directly, with real numbers and named ingredients, instead of vague marketing copy that gives the model nothing to quote.
Forums and Q&A platforms still shape trust
Word of mouth carries more weight in China than most traditional channels, and two platforms carry most of it. Baidu Tieba auto-creates a forum around any keyword typed into its search bar, so a niche topic like “scalp microbiome” often already has a live thread waiting for a brand to show up in. Zhihu is the more valuable one for lead generation: it’s a Q&A platform with an educated, high-purchasing-power user base, and its content ranks well on Baidu, so a good Zhihu answer keeps working long after it’s posted.
WeChat and Weibo, and why they now do different jobs
A WeChat official account gives a brand the authority and notification reach it needs to stay visible to people who already know it. Weibo works closer to Twitter: short, shareable, commercially minded content, where partnering with the right KOLs helps introduce a new product to an audience actively looking for discounts.
Once someone follows the official account, the real work starts. Brands that get repeat purchase out of hair care in China move followers from the public account into a private domain: a brand-run WeChat group, or a personal account run by a “consultant” who answers questions about scalp type and product routine. It looks like customer service. It functions closer to CRM. That relationship is usually what turns a one-off purchase into a repeat customer at month three, when the first bottle runs out.
Little Red Book, and now Douyin, do the actual selling
Xiaohongshu is social commerce: part Instagram, part Pinterest, part Amazon, built around content that a user browses first and buys from second. That makes it a natural fit for a category people research obsessively before purchasing. Effective posts on the platform tend to fall into three formats: before and after documentation, wish-list style guides, and step by step tutorials. With around 85% of the user base being women, it remains one of the more efficient platforms for a hair growth brand, especially compared to the cost of traditional e-commerce advertising.
Douyin increasingly earns the sale itself. Its interest e-commerce model shows a product to someone who hasn’t searched for it but has been watching related short videos, which works well for hair care because the results are visual and the audience is already primed by other users’ scalp close-ups and ponytail comparisons. Pairing a handful of KOCs, ordinary users with a few thousand followers rather than paid celebrity KOLs, with an affiliate commission on each sale is often cheaper and more credible than a single big-name influencer post.
What happened when a Serbian hair care brand skipped straight to Xiaohongshu
Nikola runs a small hair care brand out of Belgrade, built around a rosemary and biotin scalp serum that sells steadily in Serbian pharmacies. He opened a Tmall Global storefront in early 2025 expecting a similar result. After three months he had sold 46 bottles total, most of them to overseas Chinese buyers who already followed his brand on Instagram.
His first fix was the standard playbook: pay three mid-tier Xiaohongshu KOLs to post the same before and after photos he used in Europe, translated word for word. Engagement was decent. Sales barely moved. The problem wasn’t the platform. It was that the claims meant nothing to a Chinese reader: clinical European phrasing, a foreign face, a routine that assumed a bathroom cabinet full of products nobody in the audience owned.
What worked was slower and less glamorous. We rebuilt his content around the question his audience was already typing into Zhihu and DeepSeek: why is my hair thinning in my late twenties. Long, specific answers, not sales copy, explaining what rosemary oil and biotin actually do to a follicle, and why a European formulation used different concentrations than local competitors. He seeded the product with 15 KOCs instead of 3 KOLs, each with 3,000 to 8,000 followers, paid on commission, and moved anyone asking follow-up questions into a WeChat group run by a real staff member answering scalp questions daily.
Four months later, monthly orders sat at 310, repeat purchases made up about 22% of revenue, and cost per acquisition had dropped by roughly half. The product hadn’t changed. What changed is that the content finally answered a Chinese consumer’s actual question instead of repeating a European sales pitch translated into Mandarin.
Questions we get from hair care brands looking at China
How long does it take to build real visibility in this category?
Expect three to six months before organic Baidu and Zhihu content starts pulling meaningful traffic, and a similar window before a Xiaohongshu or Douyin KOC program produces a repeatable sales pattern rather than one-off spikes. Brands that try to compress this into a single 618 or Double 11 push usually overspend on media and underspend on the content and trust-building that make that media convert.
Do hair growth products need special registration in China?
It depends on the claims. A cosmetic-grade scalp serum sold through cross-border e-commerce faces lighter requirements than a product making drug-like claims about regrowth, which can fall under stricter cosmetic or even pharmaceutical rules. Check the exact wording of your marketing claims against the current regulation before you translate a single page, not after.
Xiaohongshu or Douyin first?
Xiaohongshu first, for most new entrants. It builds the credibility and searchable content library that Douyin’s interest e-commerce algorithm and DeepSeek-style AI answers can later draw on. Moving to Douyin before that foundation exists usually means paying for reach without the trust to convert it.
How should budget split between KOLs and KOCs?
For a first campaign in this category, we lean heavily toward KOCs: more voices, lower cost per post, commission-based so spend tracks results. One or two KOLs can help with initial reach once the KOC content library exists, but leading with big names before the smaller, more credible voices are in place tends to waste budget on impressions that don’t convert.
Is a Chinese business entity required to sell in this category?
No. Cross-border e-commerce through a Tmall Global or JD Worldwide storefront lets a foreign brand sell without a local entity, though it limits certain marketing formats and payment options compared to a domestic store. Many hair care brands start cross-border and only set up a local entity once volume justifies it.
Do you want to sell hair care products in China? Talk to GMA.
We are a team of native digital experts based in Shanghai, and hair and scalp care is one of the categories we work in most. We help brands get found on Baidu and now on DeepSeek, build the WeChat private domain that turns a first sale into a repeat one, and run KOC seeding on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. If you have a serious project for the Chinese market, contact us for a meeting with one of our consultants. We also work extensively in the following areas:
- Baidu SEO/PPC
- WeChat Development
- Weibo Marketing
- Chinese Content & GEO
- PR/Media Exposure
- KOC and KOL Seeding
- Ecommerce Set Up & Branding
- Lead Generation Services on Multiple Platforms
