Another foreign mass beauty brand retreats: LA Girl exits Tmall China

For the latest on skincare, cosmetics, fragrances, wellness, emerging Chinese and APAC beauty brands,subscribe to our weekly Jing Beauty Newsletter. What happened LA Girl, once a breakout success in China’s affordable color cosmetics market, is the latest international mass-market beauty brand to scale back in the mainland. The brand’s Tmall Global flagship, which accumulated 1.1 million followers and priced most SKUs around 50 RMB ($7), announced on October 30 that it would cease online operations and clear remaining stock with discounts of up to 70% off. The exit marks the end of a short but sharp growth cycle. At its peak, LA Girl’s four-shade eyeshadow palette surpassed 1.3 million cumulative units sold in China, while its blush and setting powder products also achieved sustained bestseller status among Gen Z consumers. This made the brand one of the most recognizable names in the mass high-value color cosmetics segment during China’s mid-2010s beauty boom. Why LA Girl lost momentum: Slow localization and social fading Since 2021, however, the brand’s visibility has faded. Its official Weibo and Douyin accounts have long been inactive, and it never established a WeChat official account. Product development continued to lean on its North American shade and texture profile, leaving base makeup offerings mismatched to Chinese skin undertones. In a market driven by speed, trend cycles and cultural fluency, LA Girl’s playbook stalled. LA Girl’s exit is not an isolated case. According to Chinese media outlet Cosmetics Business Online, more than 20 international beauty brands, spanning mass to mid-premium segments, have scaled back or exited China since early 2025. These include Colourpop, Laneige, Innisfree, Rakuten, Sidekick and Decorté, most of which have shuttered Tmall storefronts, withdrawn from Douyin, or stepped away from offline counters. The Jing Take: Market slowdown and domestic brand competition Macroeconomic factors underpin the pressure. China’s beauty market has slowed significantly from its high-growth era. A McKinsey report shows the market grew only 3% in 2023, with growth driven entirely by price rather than volume, indicating consumers are buying less and spending more selectively. Meanwhile, Yicai reported that in H1 2025, cosmetics retail sales grew just 2.9% year-on-year to 229 billion RMB ($32 billion), with the number of smaller brands shutting up shop in China reaching double digits. The market has shifted from expansion to reshuffle. Competition has also intensified. Domestic beauty brands now dominate the value-plus-performance narrative through agile R&D cycles, culturally fluent storytelling, and increasingly efficient Douyin-native commerce models. Many international mass brands, designed originally for steady long-cycle retail channels, struggle to adapt to China’s monthly launch cadence, content-commerce integration and ultra-fragmented social attention economy. Global mass labels must localize or retreat The exit of LA Girl is not about the decline of mass beauty; it signals the end of the global mass copy-paste model. Chinese consumers are no longer impressed by cheap and global positioning. Instead, they are choosing performance-proven, culturally resonant, platform-native brands, many of which are domestic. International brands can still win, but only through deep localization, rather than market presence alone. Shade-system redesigns, faster product iteration, creator-led storytelling, and retail models that start from Douyin, Xiaohongshu and private traffic ecosystems are now baseline requirements. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

Copy-paste is dead: What killed mass beauty brand LA Girl in China

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Copy-paste is dead: What killed mass beauty brand LA Girl in China