Alexa Olesen, Changsha, China: The beautician from Chairman Mao's hometown looks at herself in the mirror and bursts into tears of joy.

Forty pounds lighter, jaw slimmer, eyes and nose refined, breasts lifted, 30-year-old Chen Jing has just been through an extreme makeover for a Chinese reality show called 'Lovely Cinderella'.

It is a sharp insight into China's own makeover, as a consumer generation moves ever further from communist founding father Mao Zedong's era of drab-is-beautiful austerity.

Modeled after 'The Swan', Fox TV's reality television show, 'Lovely Cinderella' was created in south China's Hunan province and has tapped into a surging Chinese interest in cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, luxuries beyond the means of most a generation ago, but gaining in popularity as incomes grow.

Consumers have quickly developed their own tastes, no longer chasing Hollywood's notion of perfection but opting for their own traditional aesthetic.

Zhang Xiaomei, a publisher of fashion magazines in Beijing, says that early blunders taught doctors and patients that cosmetic surgery needed to be customised for the Chinese face.

"It was popular to do a surgery 10 years ago, a so-called European-style double eyelid that really made eyes sort of pop and appear more Caucasian but it didn't look good and Chinese women have learned from that," said Zhang.

High noses and super-plump pouts have also fallen out of favour, she said, giving way to techniques that play up, instead of distort, Asian beauty.

Asked whom they wanted to look like, 'Cinderella' contestants rattled off only Asian names: Li Jiaxin, a former Miss Hong Kong; actress Maggie Cheung; and Kim Hee-sun, a South Korean soap opera star.

This full embrace of beauty is a contrast to 30 years ago when even primping could be seen as counter revolutionary.

"Your whole life was dedicated to revolution, to the Communist Party, to struggling for the communist cause," said Zhang.

Watching the taping of 'Cinderella' with approval, Lu Zaining, mother of beautician Chen, agreed things had changed. "People then would have criticised you for putting on lipstick," she said.

In the southern city of Changsha, where 'Cinderella' is taped, spas offer seaweed wraps and slimming massages, and in plastic surgeon Li Fannian's Yahan Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, posters for implants called Magic Peach and Dream Xcell show ivory-skinned women with bursting cleavage.

The clinic's most commonly performed surgeries are minimising eye bags, sculpting noses and shaving the jawbone to soften the face.

Chinese ideas of physical perfection today jibe with ideals espoused for centuries in Chinese literature and art, Li said, describing wide, bright eyes and a face "shaped like a goose egg or a sunflower seed."

'Cinderella' contestant Yang Shaqin, a Beijing undergraduate, said she always wanted to look more like her mother.

After eight procedures, she no longer felt like an ugly duckling but insisted she would never date a man shallow enough to have cosmetic surgery.

"We have a Chinese saying, 'A man should possess talents and a woman grace'," Yang said. "Men shouldn't be worried about these trivial sorts of things."