China makes most of what the world puts on its face and head, and it comes from a handful of specific counties. Wigs, human hair, makeup brushes, false eyelashes: each has its own town, and two of them are the two ends of a single chain.
There is a global beauty supply chain hidden in a handful of Chinese counties. The glamour is applied in Paris and New York, but the thing itself, the hair, the brush, the lash, was made in Henan or Shandong, in a county most people could not place on a map. These four make most of what goes on the world's faces and heads.
A hair chain runs through the first two. Juancheng gathers and sorts raw human hair; Xuchang, a province away, turns it into finished wigs and weaves and ships them worldwide, raw material and finished product, one supply chain split across two towns. Luyi makes the bristle for most of the world's makeup brushes, and Pingdu threads the bulk of its false eyelashes, almost entirely by hand.
And the pattern is the one the whole atlas keeps finding: poor inland counties that climbed out of farming on a single product, e-commerce and export pulling them up, and the same slow move from anonymous OEM work toward their own brands. The bosses here read the world's tastes the way the lingerie county and the wig city do, region by region, and the human details are unforgettable, temple hair, sheep-tail brush fibre, mink lashes set by eye. Vanity, it turns out, has a supply chain like everything else.