The birthplace of Laozi, founder of Daoism, is also the place that makes most of the world's makeup brushes. A county in eastern Henan produces about 95% of the world's animal-hair and 85% of its synthetic brush fibre, and ships over 90% of China's makeup-brush exports — an industry that began with a butcher's scrap.
Luyi, a county of about 1.38 million in eastern Henan, has an unusually deep claim to fame: by tradition it is the birthplace of Laozi, the founder of Daoism, and the ruined Taiqing Palace here is one of the religion's old shrines. It is also, improbably, the makeup-brush capital of China. The county turns out around 150 million sets of brushes a year, ships more than 90% of China's makeup-brush exports, and its industry chain now tops 13 billion yuan across some 163 large firms and over a thousand supporting workshops.
The industry began in the 1980s in Zhangdian town, with something most people throw away: sheep tail hair, an offcut from the slaughterhouse. One local, Xie Guoyin, learned on a trip to Tianjin that wool could be sold abroad for more than the meat, brought a master back to teach the craft, and the trade caught like a grass fire across seven townships. By the 1990s some 45,000 people worked it. The former scraps had become, in the local phrase, treasures.
What Luyi really controls is the bristle. Roughly 95% of the world's animal-hair brush fibre and 85% of its synthetic fibre are produced here: soft goat and sheep tail hair for natural brushes, and engineered filament for the vegan and budget ranges. Whoever makes the fibre supplies the brands, which is why a great many of the brushes sold under Western beauty labels carry, somewhere upstream, a strand that passed through this one county.
For years Luyi sold raw fibre and made brushes for other people's labels, and the consumer value sat elsewhere. In 2016 the county set out to change that, luring its entrepreneurs home from coastal hubs like Yiwu and Shenzhen with rent-free factory space, cheap loans, a quality-testing center and a cross-border e-commerce incubator. Returnees like Huang Chunjie built their own brands, an overseas warehouse in Germany and China-Europe rail links that reach European customers in about twenty days. The climb is from invisible supplier toward brand.
Luyi is best read alongside its provincial neighbour Xuchang. Two ordinary inland Henan counties, neither one a place a foreign shopper could find on a map, quietly supply the global beauty trade: Xuchang the wigs, Luyi the brushes. Both were built by turning processed hair, human in one case, animal and synthetic in the other, into beauty products, and both are now using cross-border e-commerce to climb from contract manufacturing into brands of their own.