These trivial things are driving a booming industry. And Chinese men are also not shy about using products and sometimes surgery to look better. About 10 percent of the clients at the Yahan clinic are men, said Li, and the concept of the metrosexual has arrived, known in Mandarin as dushi yunan or 'urban pretty man'.

They spend an average of $10 a month on grooming products, according to a report in the official Xinhua News Agency in December.

Xinhua cited a survey of 2,239 men aged 18 to 60 in seven Chinese cities that found men in Shanghai to be the country's most vain because they spent just over 17 minutes a day gazing in the mirror.

Men and women together spent $12 billion on beauty products in 2005, up 13 percent from the previous year, according to the China Association of Perfume, Essence and Cosmetics Industry.

The United States Cosmetic, Fragrance, and Toiletry Association last year called China its "largest future growth market," and companies like Avon Products Inc., Mary Kay Inc., L'Oreal SA, and Procter & Gamble Co. are all fighting for a share. Zhang, the publisher, estimates there are about 1 million plastic surgeries a year in China.

In the United States, with less than a quarter of China's population of 1.3 billion, twice as many operations were performed in 2005.

Hao Lulu, a Beijing fashion writer and aspiring actress, became a sensation in the Chinese media, which dubbed her the 'Artificial Beauty', after she had 16 surgeries to redo her eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, neck, breasts, upper arms, buttocks, thighs and calves.

Last year, a military-run hospital announced it had become the second facility in the world after France to attempt a complex partial face transplant, grafting a donated nose, upper lip, cheek and eyebrow onto a farmer who had been mauled by a black bear.

The risks some take for beauty can be harrowing, especially in an industry that lacks regulation.

Wang Junhong, a 37-year-old fashion retailer from Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong province, collected elegant European trousers that she adored but couldn't wear because she was only 5 feet 2 inches tall.

So she spent $9,700 to gain two inches in a procedure that involved breaking her legs, driving pins into the bone and gradually cranking the pins apart to lengthen the bones as they heal.

"The more I thought about doing it, the more I was convinced I had to do it," said Wang, as she lay in a hospital bed in 2005, her legs encased in brutal-looking frames with spokes that jabbed through her legs.

Her treatment went smoothly, but Chinese media frequently report on bungles that result in deformity and infection.

In November, the Health Ministry banned the procedure for medical reasons. But height increases job prospects and help-wanted ads sometimes stipulate the requirements for white-collar posts.

"Taller people will have more opportunity for promotion," said Sun Honggang, an editor for Human Capital and Career Post, a Beijing newspaper dedicated to employee recruitment.

'Lovely Cinderella' producer Wang Zhiyi said that while his show is meant as entertainment, it's also cautionary. The footage is graphic, showing grotesquely swollen postoperative faces and surgeons vigorously sucking fat from a contestant's waist.

A video clip shows Chen, the beautician, crying out on the operating table for her husband and for more anaesthetic.

Later, she is shown throwing up and weeping in her hospital room because she misses her 5-year-old son. But as she gazes at herself in front of the studio audience, the memories seem to evaporate like the theatrical fog blasted out of fire extinguishers before she stepped to the mirror.

What would Mao, leader of China from the 1949 revolution until his death in 1976, make of 'Lovely Cinderella'? Chen, born in Mao's hometown of Xiangtan in Hunan, laughs.

"How can I answer that?" she says. "I think that people today, with their more liberal ways of thinking, are at a place where if someone has an opportunity to change their life and become more confident, then everyone would want to support that."