This study examines how Chinese women negotiate the notion of choice in their everyday experiences of beautification. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 14 urban women aged 29 to 38, it explores how beauty is lived and understood across private and professional domains. Three key themes emerged from the interviews encapsulating women's experiences with beautification in the Chinese context: (a) negotiating beauty standards and practices within a media environment, (b) engaging in beauty practices in private life, and (c) adapting beauty choices in the workplace. Women's agency is evident in the ways they navigate and reinterpret beauty norms within these contexts. Findings reveal that women's negotiations of beauty differ sharply between private and professional spheres. While personal beautification is often described as pleasurable and self-expressive, workplace beauty is framed as a moral and institutional expectation. These differentiated practices highlight how agency is not simply a matter of individual choice but is reflected through social hierarchies and moral obligations in the Chinese context. This paper contributes to global feminist debates on postfeminist choice by situating the concept within China's specific moral and institutional context. Rather than analysing media or consumer texts, it draws on women's own accounts of beauty and professionalism to reveal how postfeminist and Confucian discourses intertwine in everyday negotiations of agency. In doing so, it extends transnational postfeminist scholarship to a context where choice operates less as personal freedom than as a moralised social expectation.
Hua Ma (Thu,) studied this question.