The New Yorker:

We were at the headquarters of Meipai’s parent company, Meitu, Inc. Its first product, in 2008, was a photo-editing app, also named Meitu (“beautiful picture,” in Chinese), which young people seized upon as a means of enhancing their selfies. The company now has a battery of apps, with names like BeautyPlus, BeautyCam, and SelfieCity, which smooth out skin, exaggerate features, brighten eyes.

The apps are installed on more than a billion phones—mostly in China and the rest of Asia, but also increasingly in the West, where Meitu seeks to expand its presence. The company sells a range of smartphones, too, designed to take particularly flattering selfies: the front-facing selfie cameras have more powerful sensors and processors than those on regular phones, and beautifying apps start working their magic the moment a picture has been taken. Phone sales accounted for ninety-three per cent of Meitu’s revenue last year, and the company is now valued at six billion dollars. Its I.P.O., a year ago, was the largest Internet-company offering that the Hong Kong stock exchange had seen in nearly a decade.

This is a fascinating story. What gets me the most is how big the beautified selfie is in Chinese culture. Seems to me this wave has huge potential and has yet to emerge in the US, at least not in the same way. This seems like a massive business opportunity for the company that figures out how to build the right app.

UPDATE: A check of the Top Paid list on the App Store shows this gem at the top spot: Facetune [H/T James Hill]. Interestingly, it is the only app of its kind in the top 50. An indication of how difficult this is to do and get right?