Business of Beauty
China's 'Lipstick King' Bets Humans Beat AI in Livestream Selling
Li Jiaqi, China's 'Lipstick King,' has moved billions in beauty via livestream. Despite slowing growth and AI reshaping the sector, he insists live selling still needs human hosts.
Li Jiaqi has sold billions of dollars worth of beauty products through China's livestream shopping channels, and he is betting that artificial intelligence will not replace the people who do it.
For nearly a decade, the host known as the "Lipstick King" has been the face of China's livestream shopping industry, according to The Business of Fashion. He helped grow a niche selling format into one of the country's most important retail channels.
That channel is now under pressure on two fronts. Growth in livestream commerce is slowing. At the same time, artificial intelligence is reshaping how the sector operates, prompting questions about whether digital hosts and automated selling tools can do the work that human stars like Li have done.
Li's answer is no. Despite the slowdown and the AI disruption, he believes live selling will still depend on people like him, BoF reports.
The stakes for the beauty industry are considerable. Livestream shopping has become a primary route to market for beauty brands in China, and Li Jiaqi has been its most powerful individual gateway. A single session with the Lipstick King has historically moved product at a scale that few other retail formats in any market can match. His endorsement can make or break a launch, and his ability to demonstrate products, answer questions in real time and build parasocial trust with viewers has been central to the format's conversion power.
AI-generated hosts and automated livestream tools challenge that model directly. They can run around the clock, at lower cost, without the scheduling constraints and fee demands of a top human anchor. For brands and platforms watching margins, the economics are tempting. For an industry built on personality-driven persuasion, the question is whether algorithms can replicate the credibility that made figures like Li indispensable.
Li's position carries weight because he has already survived several cycles of change in Chinese e-commerce. He outlasted regulatory scrutiny, platform algorithm shifts and the broader cooldown in consumer spending that has hit beauty and fashion categories across the market. His continued relevance, even as growth slows, is itself a data point in the debate over what livestream commerce needs to keep converting.
The signal for beauty brands and retailers elsewhere is also clear. Western companies have spent years trying to export the Chinese livestream model, with mixed results. If China's largest live-selling market now splits between human-led formats and AI automation, the experiment will offer the clearest evidence yet of which approach actually drives sales at scale.
Li Jiaqi is placing his bet on the humans. The next phase of China's livestream commerce will show whether the market agrees with him, and the answer will shape how beauty brands allocate their digital selling budgets far beyond China.
Source: Business of Fashion
Grace Kim
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Correspondent covering media and advertising at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
