Zhao Qing, 28, prefers cherry or wine lipstick to glossy pink. Her eye sockets are padded with earthy color, and a thick layer of light gold is spread in the middle of her eyelids. She deliberately emboldens the width of the eye ends, making sure they look long and slightly curved upward at the corners.

She retouches her makeup to match her natural caramel skin, an effective and quick way for her to look delicate yet assertive, especially at the beginning of a long workday.

She is young with a calm face whose lines now exude confidence and a certain strength. Last year she was no longer obsessed with whitening, and "the new tanning look helps me drop the pretense and discover the real me", she says.

In 2018 the popular online talent show Creation 101 allowed a group of young women to compete for 11 places in a women's pop band; the 25-year-old model agent Wang Ju, sturdy and swarthy according to media descriptions, was almost eliminated at the beginning of the season and seemed unlikely to succeed. However, by June Wang ranked second among the 22 finalists, gaining increasing public attention.

The other women in the show had snowwhite skin, slender figures and sweet smiles, complying with the prevailing aesthetic standard, in fact the beauty standard that most young women all over China today pursue. Wang's unexpected overnight popularity provided an opportunity for the Chinese public to reflect on the concept of Chinese women and their beauty standards. Ultimately she failed to win, but her dramatic ups and downs triggered debate on issues such as body image, social status and women's empowerment.

It is not so much that women such as Wang are promoting a new trend of beautiful and black; rather, they have been trapped by the trend and are now accepting their dark skin and finding the beauty that suits them.

At the beginning of March 2019, Li Pink, a video blogger, opened an account on Bilibili, a popular Chinese video content provider similar to You-Tube, and released three videos on techniques of self-tanning. Li, a Shanghainese with a Northeast accent, calls herself the Dubai princess and Indian Belle. In particular she believes her tanning makeup gives her the maximum aesthetic pleasure.

Unkind souls have left malicious remarks under her video page that have set off cyber spats, such as: "Your voice is unpleasant, like a man's. Are you a ladyboy?" and "Have you had plastic surgery? Is this face real?" The attacks on her seem to boil down to the critics' consensus that she fails to meet their standards, not looking "feminine enough".

She knows the world of skin whitening well, she says, including its changing standards, and has got used to the taunts. What she does is all about "opening up aesthetically", she says, even if that means standing out in the crowd.

Becoming a different one in the crowd spawned a plethora of playful jokes about her, a marinated egg in soy sauce among hard-boiled white eggs, and for her it is just a difference in flavor. Since her first video, The Daily Makeup of Bilibi's No 1 Dark Skin Cool Girl, in February 2019, she has garnered 620,000 subscriptions.

For her, applying tanning makeup is a ceremony.

"Before you meet people in disguise you dare not give the show away in front of them, but after you break free of the constraints, many things in life will seem to be a lot more smooth."

She feels that she is now entering a more inclusive environment from a narrow aesthetic circle. It does not have to be matched with fitness, European and American makeup, or some style of clothes. She can be cute, wear a Lolita skirt or whatever style she wants, she says. There are hundreds of ways to develop her tanning look, and she aims to tell people about it.

"Tanned skin is not an aesthetic; it's just skin that has a certain color."

Ellen Wang, owner of a tanning studio Perfect Tan Tanning, in Shanghai, says whitening is no longer the ultimate goal for many women, and her customers are very serious about being beautiful. For example, the "death Barbie pink", a fluorescent pink color, would be a fashion disaster with most skin color normally, "but strangely enough it matches a tanned skin so well, and everyone here is happy to show and appreciate their body".

The aesthetic experience and concept is being explained and redefined in the era of diversity. One may be the best proof of how aging－a factor that has always been considered as a disadvantage, especially for women－has begun to turn into an edge, at least in the public sphere.

In the popular talent show Sisters Who Brave the Winds and Waves, the female participants were all over 30. Many said that after watching the show they were no longer afraid of becoming old.

"At any age you can ride the wind and waves like these sisters, dare to challenge and set off bravely," a post on the show's Weibo page says. "Don't set limits on your age, don't fear aging, and dare to live your own beauty."

Jiang Wenxiu of the Department of Psychiatry, Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University in Nanjing says: "These women's touch of specificity lies in their unique 'ordinariness', and such features have increased their attractiveness to women. It is this unconventional ordinariness that inspires identification and new possibilities.

"At the same time, it also means the representation of the role of the new female consciousness in popular culture. With the increasing ability of female consumers to be at the forefront of consumption and cultural trends, the female self and the idea of being self-conscious without being appreciated－with its ability to determine the direction of spending habits－has become more widely accepted.

"The important force of culture and this feminine consciousness also gives the so-called ordinariness a sense of identity, and this sense of identity reflects the expansion of space for new possibilities. This kind of feminine consciousness is more recognized by the public and more assertive than the traditional concept of men."