Yatsen describes Perfect Diary as its first and largest brand and one of China’s leading color-cosmetics brands by retail sales value.

2017: Foundation

Perfect Diary was launched in 2017 by Yatsen as a new-generation Chinese cosmetics brand. Its original proposition was to create well-designed, fashionable, and easy-to-use makeup at an accessible price, while adapting global beauty trends to Asian consumers. The company described its initial product philosophy as combining European and American beauty trends with consideration for Asian facial features and skin characteristics.

The timing aligned with a rapid shift in China’s cosmetics market from traditional department-store and counter-based purchasing toward e-commerce, social media, and influencer-driven discovery. Perfect Diary was designed specifically for this digital environment from its inception.

2019: Rapid Breakthrough

Within approximately three years, Perfect Diary became a major Chinese domestic beauty brand. According to Yatsen’s filings, it became the No. 1 color-cosmetics brand in China by online retail sales value three years after launch, based on cited CIC research.

The brand reported strong performance on Tmall, China’s major e-commerce platform. Historical brand materials state that it became a leading domestic beauty brand among young Tmall followers and achieved the No. 1 position in several beauty categories during the 2019 Double 11 shopping festival.

This period established the model that defined Perfect Diary’s growth:
social media → influencer/KOL exposure → e-commerce traffic → attractive packaging → affordable product → rapid sales → data-driven product development.

2020: Parent Company IPO

In November 2020, Yatsen Holding went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker YSG. It is important to note that Perfect Diary itself was not separately listed; it remains a brand belonging to Yatsen.

The IPO marked a significant moment in the rise of China’s emerging domestic beauty industry. At that point, Perfect Diary had already established itself as Yatsen’s flagship brand and the primary example of its digitally native direct-to-consumer model.

Perfect Diary’s central English slogan and concept is “Unlimited Beauty”. The idea posits that beauty should not be restricted to a single conventional definition. The brand emphasizes individuality, experimentation, and self-expression.

Earlier brand values were summarized around four concepts:

• Perfection
• Discovery
• Difference
• Diversity

The brand describes these values as encouraging consumers to pursue beauty, explore different possibilities, express their individuality, and respect diverse forms of beauty 3. This positioning distinguished Perfect Diary from traditional luxury cosmetics houses, appealing instead to younger consumers who wanted to experiment with makeup and define beauty on their own terms.

Perfect Diary initially focused heavily on Gen Z and young millennials. In a 2020 interview, the company described its target consumer as young women aged 18–28, noting a particularly young existing customer base.

This positioning resonated because younger Chinese consumers were increasingly:

• Comfortable shopping online;
• Influenced by social media;
• Interested in KOL/KOC recommendations;
• Willing to experiment with makeup;
• Interested in trendy packaging;
• Less attached to traditional Western prestige brands;
• Increasingly interested in Chinese brands.

Over time, Yatsen has attempted to broaden Perfect Diary beyond its original young-consumer identity. Current strategies explicitly continue to target Gen Z and millennials while expanding appeal through more sophisticated formulations and skincare-oriented products.

Perfect Diary began primarily as a color cosmetics company but has developed a considerably broader portfolio.

Lip Products

Lip products have historically been one of its most important categories. Examples include:

• Biolip Essence Lipstick
• Biolip Essence Lip Stain
• Biolip Essence Matte Lipstick
• Weightless Velvet Lip Stain
• ReadMe Lips
• Lip glosses and pigments

The current international website highlights products such as ReadMe Lips, lip stains, lip pigments, and Biolip Essence Lipstick.

Face Makeup

The brand sells foundations, setting powders, loose powders, blush, contour, highlighter, and other complexion products. The Translucent Blurring Setting Powder has become one of its key items.

Eye Makeup

Perfect Diary offers eyeshadow palettes, mascara, eyeliner, and other eye products. Its Explorer Eyeshadow Palette series is particularly recognizable.

Skincare-Oriented Makeup

Increasingly important to the brand’s future is the “makeup skintification” strategy, which attempts to combine makeup and skincare rather than treating them as separate categories 4.

One of Perfect Diary’s most recognizable product concepts is the Explorer Eyeshadow Palette. The series used animals and nature as creative themes, including designs inspired by tigers, cats, foxes, fancy carp, and other wildlife.

This concept helped differentiate the brand in a crowded eyeshadow market and demonstrated a core characteristic: the product functions simultaneously as cosmetics, packaging design, and storytelling. Collaborations with organizations such as the Discovery Channel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum further illustrate this strategy of turning beauty products into cultural and visual objects 5.

Another notable concept is ReadMe Lips. Instead of presenting lipstick as a traditional cosmetic, Perfect Diary used a card/reading-inspired visual concept. This reflects the company’s approach to creating products that consumers want to photograph, discuss, and share, rather than merely use. ReadMe Lips remains listed among prominent products on the official website.

A significant development in recent history is the transition from a “trendy Chinese makeup brand” to a technology-driven beauty brand. In 2023, Yatsen repositioned Perfect Diary with a refreshed visual identity and launched the Biolip Essence Lipstick as its new hero product.

The product uses proprietary Biotec™ technology. According to Yatsen, this technology creates a bionic sebum film on the lips, helping reinforce the lip skin barrier while delivering color. Efficacy regarding lip-line reduction was validated by Ruijin Hospital and SGS testing.

The product line expanded to include:

• First-generation Biolip Essence Lipstick (2023);
• Second generation (2024);
• Third generation (2025);
• Biolip Essence Lip Stain;
• Biolip Essence Matte Lipstick.

Yatsen reported that the Biolip Essence Lipstick became one of the top-selling lipstick products across multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms during 2024.

The transformation continued in 2025 with the introduction of the Bioface Essence Foundation, using third-generation Biotec™ technology, alongside the Translucent Blurring Setting Powder, which uses Smartlock™ technology.

This signals a change in brand identity:

• Earlier Perfect Diary: Affordable + trendy + visually distinctive + social-media friendly
• Newer Perfect Diary: Makeup + skincare + biotechnology + formulation/R&D + premiumized product experience

The brand aims to move upward from being perceived mainly as a fashionable domestic makeup brand toward becoming a technology-led beauty brand.

Digital-First Approach

Unlike traditional cosmetics companies dependent on department stores and television, Perfect Diary was born in the e-commerce/social-media era. Its ecosystem includes Tmall, JD.com, Douyin, Pinduoduo, Vipshop, WeChat, RedNote/Xiaohongshu, KOLs, KOCs, and livestream commerce. Yatsen states its brands now have an omnichannel presence across virtually all major Chinese e-commerce platforms.

KOL and Livestream Marketing

Influencer marketing has been central to growth. The brand became closely associated with China’s KOL and livestream-commerce ecosystem, particularly in the late 2010s and early 2020s. This allowed rapid conversion of content → attention → recommendation → purchase without relying solely on traditional advertising. Yatsen continues to describe its marketing approach as digitally native, utilizing platforms like Douyin and RedNote alongside a broad KOL network.

Collaboration is a defining feature of Perfect Diary. The brand connects cosmetics with wildlife, art, museums, cultural heritage, entertainment, popular intellectual properties, and Chinese culture. Notable cultural collaborations include those with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and Chinese National Geography. These partnerships give relatively inexpensive makeup products a stronger collectible and cultural identity.

Perfect Diary’s visual identity has evolved significantly. Early identities featured strong colors, youthful packaging, playful themes, animal imagery, and highly Instagram-/Xiaohongshu-friendly products with frequent limited editions. The 2023 repositioning aimed to make the brand more sophisticated, supporting its shift toward technology and skincare-oriented makeup with a refreshed visual identity and new hero products.

Although starting as a digital-first brand, Perfect Diary expanded into physical retail. Yatsen’s offline model uses experience stores rather than traditional counters. As of December 31, 2025, Yatsen operated 77 offline stores, with Perfect Diary operating the majority of the group’s experience stores. Online and offline systems are designed to reinforce one another, driving customers between digital campaigns and physical store visits.

Perfect Diary has pursued international business. Yatsen established a subsidiary in 2019 partly to operate Perfect Diary’s online sales outside Tmall and its Southeast Asian online business through Perfect Diary’s international website 6. The brand’s international website currently sells products directly, presenting Perfect Diary as a global beauty brand with products such as Explorer palettes, lip products, and setting powders 7. Yatsen has described its broader ambition as building internationally influential Chinese beauty brands.

Recent evolution involves an increasing emphasis on R&D. Yatsen established an R&D and manufacturing hub with Cosmax in Guangzhou, which began operations in August 2023. In 2024, Yatsen announced deeper collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including projects with its Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry. Additional research collaborations involve Ruijin Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and specialty-ingredient companies. This strategy aims to make R&D a competitive advantage rather than relying primarily on packaging, marketing, and speed-to-market.

Perfect Diary promotes environmental and animal-protection initiatives. For example, in 2020, the brand collaborated with Li Jiaqi to donate RMB 1 per Explorer Puppy Palette sale to the Beijing Animal Protection Fund. It introduced a Red-crowned Crane eyeshadow palette inspired by the endangered species, connected to a conservation project. The brand states its packaging paper meets environmental certification requirements intended to prevent sourcing from endangered species or illegal logging.

Understanding Perfect Diary requires understanding Yatsen. Founded in 2016, one year before Perfect Diary, Yatsen operates a multi-brand beauty portfolio including Perfect Diary, Little Ondine, Pink Bear, Galénic, DR.WU’s mainland-China business, Eve Lom, and others. Perfect Diary was the first brand Yatsen launched and remains its flagship color-cosmetics brand. The corporate structure is best simplified as Yatsen Holding → Perfect Diary.

The original business model can be summarized as DTC + digital marketing + rapid product development. The cycle involved identifying trends, developing visually distinctive products, launching via e-commerce, using KOL/KOC content for awareness, collecting data, rapidly iterating, and expanding successful categories. Yatsen describes this digitally native model as a core capability allowing rapid brand scaling 8.

Perfect Diary occupies a middle ground, generally more affordable than luxury international brands but with branding and presentation attempting to look more sophisticated than basic mass-market labels. Its competitive set includes:

Chinese/C-beauty Brands

• Florasis / 花西子
• Judydoll / 橘朵
• Colorkey
• Into You
• Flower Knows
• Joocyee
• Girlcult

International Brands

• Maybelline
• L’Oréal
• MAC
• NARS
• Estée Lauder-group brands
• Other mass and mid-market cosmetics companies

Historical differentiation came from combining Chinese consumer insight + fast product development + strong design + digital marketing + affordable pricing. Newer differentiation is increasingly based on R&D and makeup-skincare integration.

Several factors contributed to Perfect Diary’s success:

1. Understanding China’s digital consumer: Built for an environment where discovery happens on social media and purchases occur immediately online.
2. Excellent packaging and visual storytelling: Products function as social-media objects as much as cosmetics.
3. Affordable price: Allowed experimentation without luxury prices.
4. Fast response to trends: Rapid introduction of new concepts, shades, and collaborations.
5. Strong KOL ecosystem: Influencers accelerated awareness and conversion.
6. Localization: Adapted international trends to Chinese and Asian consumers rather than copying Western brands.
7. Data-driven product development: Digital sales provided extensive consumer information for subsequent development.

As of 2025–2026, Perfect Diary’s strategy differs substantially from its 2017 identity. Major themes include R&D → biotechnology → skincare benefits → premiumization → stronger hero products → broader brand equity. The Biolip lipstick was the first major expression of this strategy, followed by Bioface Essence Foundation and newer Biotec™ generations 9. Meanwhile, Yatsen’s overall business recovered strongly in 2025, with consolidated revenue increasing 26.7% to RMB 4.30 billion for the full year. Note that this figure represents Yatsen’s total revenue, not Perfect Diary’s standalone revenue.

The transformation is significant because Perfect Diary no longer seeks to win purely through being cheaper, trendier, or faster. It increasingly wants consumers to associate the name with technology, formulation, efficacy, and sophisticated beauty products.

Perfect Diary represents a major stage in the development of C-beauty. Before brands like Perfect Diary, China’s color-cosmetics market was strongly associated with international names. Perfect Diary demonstrated that a Chinese company could build a major national cosmetics brand, achieve enormous online sales, utilize Chinese social-commerce infrastructure as a competitive advantage, develop sophisticated packaging, build a multi-brand group, and eventually expand internationally. In this sense, it helped move Chinese cosmetics from “domestic alternative” toward “independent consumer brand.”

Perfect Diary is a Chinese, digitally native cosmetics brand founded in 2017 by Yatsen, best known for combining affordable fashionable makeup, highly shareable design, influencer-driven e-commerce, and cultural collaborations, and is now transitioning toward a more R&D- and biotechnology-driven “makeup skintification” positioning.

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