A Photo Studio Said It Only Serves Customers Under 132 Pounds — and Called It Honesty
A Hubei portrait studio's booking page restricted four packages to customers under 60 kilograms, saying it did not want to spend its life 'liquefying' bodies in retouching software. Staff now call it a misunderstanding, but the row has put China's retouching-first beauty economy on trial.
A photography studio in Huangshi, Hubei province, has become the center of a national argument about beauty standards — not for its pictures, but for a line on its booking page. Four of its portrait packages, the page said, were open only to customers weighing under 120 jin — 60 kilograms, about 132 pounds. The reason, in the studio's own words: "We think there is one kind of beauty you can strive for, which is being a bit thinner. And we really don't want to waste our lives in endless liquefying."
"Liquefying" — the Chinese word is yihua — is the industry term for the liquid-like warping of a photo in retouching software, the tool that slims jaws, arms and waists on request. The studio's point, as its staff explained when the page went viral, was not to bar heavier customers in general but to set expectations: customers shaped by online beauty feeds, it said, often demand extreme retouching, and this studio prefers a natural style it will not depart from. Staff called the note "not a hard weight limit."
The explanation has satisfied almost no one. On Zhihu, where the question of what to make of the rule drew a spot on the trending board, the objections converge on the same point: whatever the intention, the studio published a number and made a customer's body a condition of entry, and the "beauty you can strive for" framing is precisely the moralizing that turns personal aesthetics into a public judgment. Others defended the studio's honesty — better a stated policy than a customer paying for a sitting and then fighting the retoucher over it.
The dispute lands in a country where portrait retouching is not an indulgence but the default. The photo studios that line Chinese shopping malls deliver, as standard, faces smoothed to a porcelain finish, and customers know to ask for more. That expectation has consequences its practitioners have started to name: a generation raised on self-images no camera could produce, and a widening gap between the mirror and the gallery file.
It also lands amid a broader pushback. Chinese social media has spent two years arguing over "white, young and thin" as a tyrannical standard — body-positive influencers, hospital warnings about the extreme diets behind viral challenges, regulators forcing beauty apps to label filters. A studio turning its own aesthetic philosophy into a booking condition was never going to read as neutral.
The more awkward question the studio's defenders prefer not to answer is why "we don't want to retouch heavily" requires a weight ceiling. A natural-style studio could simply refuse extreme edits at the counter, and does. Putting the number on the packages instead means a 61-kilogram customer is turned away before anyone has looked at a photograph of her — which is why the story refused to die, on Zhihu and Baidu, for days after the studio's response.
The studio, for now, has kept the line on its page.