To explore the effect of beauty on income in the Chinese labor market and its impact, this chapter uses the Chinese family panel studies (CFPS2018) open-access data to conduct a regression to explore the correlation of “beauty premium” in China's labor market. The authors use gender, age groups, educational levels, and individual characteristics such as height and body mass index (BMI) as independent variables. The authors show that appearance directly affects income through cognitive and non-cognitive abilities.
TopIntroduction
The term “Face Value” (顏值) or “Beauty Premium” originated in Japan and became popular on the Internet at the end of 2014 to describe the value of a person’s appearance. Despite an ancient saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” or the Chinese proverb, “you cannot judge a person by his face” (人不可以貌相), modern society is often not the case. Appearance usually determines the first impression in many circumstances. Beauty premium is not just a popular online term in this era of attaching great importance to beauty. More and more idols participating in talent shows under their attractive appearance have become increasingly popular, causing an upsurge in the “beauty economy.” The same applies to brands, further coupled with good reputations, for promotion. When the public’s urgent need to improve their appearance has become a trend, the rise of young consumers has spawned the prosperity of “beauty economy” markets such as beauty, makeup cosmetics, selfies, and so on. In the current era of continuous material life and aesthetic improvement, people pay more attention to their external appearance. Research shows that personal appearance impacts all aspects of life, such as education (Margolin, 1987), social life (Feingold, 1992), and marriage (Ritts et al., 1992).
At the same time, in the “involuted” (increasingly competitive) Chinese labor market, there are many cases of “appearance discrimination” (Zhou, 2012). When the ability differences between several interviewers are slight, appearance becomes a significant factor. Human resources decision-makers are more likely to choose candidates meeting their appearance preferences, causing subjectiveness and unfairness in the evaluation process. Further, Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) found that even in later career life, employees with good appearance have higher salaries and more promotion opportunities than those with ordinary appearance, and those with better appearance can get higher income. The phenomenon of “beauty premium” does exist in the labor market. (Biddle et al., 1998; Harper, 2000), while the worse the appearance, the lower the income is known as the “ugly fine” (Mocan et al., 2010).
This study explores whether appearance characteristics significantly influence wage levels and the extent of their impact, providing empirical evidence for explaining the phenomenon of “beauty premium” in the Chinese labor market. We use the existing Chinese Family Panel Study (CFPS) 2018 research data and econometric principles to establish an income model based on the Mincer equation and two factors, educational level and age. Secondly, appearance can also be subdivided into multiple dimensions, such as height, weight, and BMI index, to verify the robustness of the regression results. Thirdly, mechanism analysis for the “beauty premium” phenomenon can further reveal the real reason for its existence. Thus, the results can enrich the research on income inequality caused by the effects of “beauty premium” and “ugly fine” in the Chinese labor market.