Meitu, China’s selfie king

Meitu, meaning “beautiful picture”, is China’s most popular app for improving selfies -- a necessity in a country obsessed with selfies. Meitu app had 115 million monthly active users in June 2018.

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Still, these selfies are pretty funny, right? (Picture: Abacus/Twitter)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 8:46pm, 24 Sep 2018Updated: 8:08am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

If there’s one thing China loves more than taking selfies, it’s looking good in selfies. And Meitu is all about that.

Meitu is a big reason China fell in love with taking selfies: It offers a wide range of tools to touch up your selfies. From slapping virtual makeup on your face to removing wrinkles and blemishes, to even changing the shape of your features: Meitu can even enlarge your eyes or make your whole head slimmer.

In 2017, it even became a viral hit in the US, as celebrities flooded social media with their touched-up selfies. But Meitu’s US success was short-lived: It came under fire for apparently violating user privacy when people discovered it was sending an unusual amount of data back to its servers in China. (Meitu denies invading user privacy, saying it only collected data to improve the app.)

Its founder, Xinhong Wu, was running a domain-name registration businesses before he created the Meitu app in 2008 in China’s port city of Xiamen. A fan of photography and art, he told Abacus that he wanted to create an easy tool for people to enhance their photos.

But his app has come under fire. People blame Meitu for elevating the importance of appearances, and creating an unhealthy culture that’s fixated on online beauty. Among the country’s selfie-obsessed youth, it’s thought to be rude if someone only “Meitu” themselves in a group picture -- without doing the same for others.