A technical exchange meeting full of "practical information" has injected fresh vitality into the development of the beauty and personal care industry. On September 27, the 2022 Beauty and Personal Care Appliance Industry Technical Exchange Conference, hosted by the Beauty and Personal Care Appliance Special Committee of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, was held in Ningbo. Experts and more than 160 representatives from over 80 companies gathered together to address the common technical issues of products in the beauty and personal care appliance industry, which has a wide range of product categories and extremely demanding user experience requirements, and to propose innovative technical solutions with broad perspectives and cross-border integration.

The industry's development prospects are good, and it insists on innovation to serve users.

In 2022, affected by multiple factors such as repeated epidemics, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, high inflation, and supply-demand imbalance, the global economic recovery slowed significantly, and consumer confidence weakened. Although the growth pressure on China's beauty and personal care appliance industry has significantly increased, its overall performance remains robust. In the first half of 2022, the retail sales of China's beauty and personal care appliance industry reached 22.65 billion yuan, down 3.3%; the export volume reached US$2.24 billion, up 3.2%, both domestic and export sales outperformed the overall home appliance industry. The continuous development and promotion of new technologies, new materials, new processes, new scenarios, and new channels in various sub-categories of beauty and personal care appliances have continuously driven industry development, continuously producing eye-catching innovative enterprises, leading the upward trend of industry value while greatly stimulating the vitality of the industry.

The beauty and personal care appliance industry has a wide range of product categories and many companies participating in market competition. The industry's development faces many problems on the supply side, such as serious product homogeneity, low high-end penetration rate, weak brand competitiveness, high patent barriers for core technologies and components, and product functions and experiences that cannot fully meet user needs. In this regard, Zhu Jun, vice president of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, said in his opening remarks at the conference: "The beauty and personal care appliance industry has good development prospects, but it also faces many difficulties and problems. The industry should broaden its horizons, enhance its understanding of users, and insist on innovation to serve users, firmly and continuously improve its technological innovation capabilities, and accumulate strength for long-term development. The 2022 Beauty and Personal Care Appliance Industry Technical Exchange Conference hopes to help companies continuously improve their product and technological innovation capabilities and gradually strengthen the internal driving force of industry development through this continuous, extensive, in-depth, and diversified exchange and discussion at the industry level."

Broadening perspectives and cross-border integration to solve common technical problems in the industry.

Electric toothbrushes, electric irrigators, hair dryers, beauty instruments, electric shavers, curling/straightening irons…The beauty and personal care appliance product categories are numerous, and the technical focus points of each sub-category are not the same, while noise, antibacterial properties, design, and intelligence are the common technical keywords of concern in the industry's development.

Due to the particularity of product structure, function, and usage scenarios, beauty and personal care appliances have their unique requirements in noise and vibration control. At this technical exchange meeting, Professor Chen Ke'an from Northwestern Polytechnical University proposed that because beauty and personal care appliances are in close contact with the human body during use, the harm of noise and vibration to the user experience is further amplified. The perceived noise of some products is extremely high, even exceeding 80 dB, causing noise annoyance, reducing speech clarity, causing vibration discomfort, and reducing work efficiency and user experience. At the same time, most beauty and personal care appliances are small, light, and inexpensive, which limits noise reduction measures. Resonance absorption, sound insulation structures, and active noise reduction technologies are not applicable to many sub-categories of beauty and personal care appliances. "Currently, the industry has abundant and mature noise control technologies. Beauty and personal care appliance companies should fully understand and absorb existing technological achievements, actively deploy and develop new technologies, and achieve a leap-forward development in the sound quality of beauty and personal care appliances," said Chen Ke'an. He also particularly emphasized that in the design process of beauty and personal care appliance products, not only the noise level should be considered, but also the sound quality should be considered to maximize the improvement of the subjective feeling of radiated noise during the operation of beauty and personal care appliance products, and sound quality should be regarded as an important component in measuring product quality.

Antibacterial properties are an important technical development direction of common concern for beauty and personal care appliances. Chengdu Tianyou Jingchuang Technology Co., Ltd. provides multiple solutions based on the needs of end consumers and the characteristics of beauty and personal care appliances. Wang Pengji, the company's technical director, introduced at the meeting: "In the field of beauty and personal care appliances, the application scenarios of antibacterial technology are diverse and complex. For example, the handle and nozzle of a hair dryer, the bristles, brush head, and handle of an electric toothbrush, the handle, blade unit, and base of an electric shaver, and the silicone parts of a beauty instrument all need antibacterial treatment. In addition to using traditional methods such as antibacterial plastics, antibacterial silicone products, and antibacterial activated carbon to enhance the health attributes of beauty and personal care appliances, technologies such as microcrystalline blue nanosilver antibacterial particles and zinc-based antibacterial agents can also be selected according to the product characteristics." According to the introduction, Tianyou Jingchuang's core technology, four-needle zinc oxide whiskers (T-ZnOw), is a multifunctional new material with outstanding performance in antibacterial, mildew-proof, air purification, wear resistance, and anti-static fields. It has obtained 10 national invention patents and has been jointly evaluated as a national key new product by five ministries and commissions.

Beauty and personal care appliances have a strong personal attribute and strong experience characteristics, requiring products to be safer, healthier, more comfortable, and more efficient. Dr. Hu Huimin from the China National Institute of Standardization provided ideas for improving the user experience of beauty and personal care appliances from the perspective of ergonomics. She proposed that the core idea of constructing an ergonomics indicator system is to be people-centered, considering the adaptability between the target users, usage scenarios, and main human-computer interaction tasks, and provided the direction of user experience touchpoint analysis for sub-categories of beauty and personal care appliances such as electric toothbrushes, electric shavers, and hair dryers.

In recent years, whether it is a hair dryer or a curling/straightening iron, healthy hair care functions have gradually become standard features and are also important selling points of the product. There are various mechanisms for hair care. At the meeting, Professor Lai Wei, chief physician of the dermatology department of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, explained the hair care mechanism from a scientific and professional perspective and provided valuable strategic guidance for the research and development of hair-related products.

With the expansion of the market scale of beauty and personal care appliances, the problem of product homogeneity has emerged, and design differentiation has become an important means for companies to gain a competitive advantage. Ma Longbin, general manager of Shenzhen Jingwei Innovation Design Co., Ltd., shared his unique insights on forming the design style of beauty and personal care appliance products around brand tonality at the meeting. In addition, regarding the development trend of intelligent beauty and personal care appliances, Gu Jiayuan, senior product solution manager of Hangzhou Tuya Information Technology Co., Ltd., introduced how to revitalize beauty and personal care appliances through IoT platforms.

Large market incremental space, opportunities and challenges coexist in various sub-categories.

Compared with developed countries, the penetration rate of many sub-categories of beauty and personal care appliance products in the Chinese market is still relatively low, and the market incremental space for products is very large. Many product categories are in the key stage of transitioning from the introduction stage to the growth stage. Technological innovation is the important content that participating companies are eager to express and hope to obtain industry recognition at this technical exchange meeting, in order to seek development in this industry full of particularity, opportunities, and challenges.

Ningbo Yunbao Electric Appliance Co., Ltd.'s main product is electric hair clippers, and it has accumulated technological research and development achievements in this sub-segment. At this technical exchange meeting, the company's marketing director, Feng Lijuan, analyzed the changes in market demand for electric hair clippers in terms of material changes, waterproof requirements, safety blades, low noise, etc., as well as product upgrades, and proposed four technical breakthrough directions: charging methods, wireless design, hair suction function, and combination blade material selection.

With people increasingly attaching importance to oral hygiene and dental health, the market for electric toothbrushes and electric irrigators is performing well. Intelligence is one of the important directions for the development of electric toothbrushes. Huang Daocheng, R&D director of Dongguan Libode Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., pointed out in his speech at the meeting that the intelligence of electric toothbrushes has problems with non-standard definitions, superficiality, and conceptualization. He further explained: "The maturity of intelligent support technology for electric toothbrushes is low, the detection accuracy is limited, and the degree of intelligence and the accuracy of scoring need to be improved. Next, intelligent electric toothbrushes should develop around three directions: full automation achieved through new structures and new controls; IoT intelligent full-scenario interaction provided by scene functions, intelligent algorithms, and advanced hardware; and refined personalized customization completed through population segmentation and function segmentation."

For electric toothbrushes, the small brush head contains a lot of knowledge. "Many factors affect the brush head experience, the most important of which are size design, bristle planting technology, and bristle selection." Zhu Zhisheng, a research and development engineer at Weimeizi Industry (Guangdong) Co., Ltd., proposed that innovation, function, and experience are the three keywords for the development trend of electric toothbrush brush heads. He further explained: "Continuously innovate and break through in bristle and bristle planting technology, explore automatic identification of special functions on the basis of achieving the whitening and gum protection functions of electric toothbrushes, enhance the comfort of brushing experience, and create brand value."

As an auxiliary tool for oral cleaning, electric irrigators have attracted many companies to accelerate their layout in recent years. At this technical exchange meeting, Lu Jingsong, R&D manager of Shanghai Feixiang Health Technology Co., Ltd., shared the design directions of the three major systems of electric irrigators: jet, transmission, and water pump. He introduced: "The jet system design should optimize and adjust the design parameters through simulation technology combined with testing, combining the size of the spray head holes with pulse technology, the shape of the outlet, and the jet shape of the nozzle water flow to achieve different water output explicit effects; the transmission system design can achieve shock absorption and noise reduction through precision gear design, and achieve efficiency optimization and motor efficiency transmission design optimization through different materials and speed ratios of transmission gears; improving reliability and stability through different cylinder liners and piston materials and matching methods is the design direction of the electric irrigator water pump system."

"Technical misunderstandings, arbitrary parameters, and safety hazards are three major technical development problems that the industry urgently needs to solve." Xu Wenbin, director of the Technical Research Institute of Xuanmeimeijian (Shenzhen) Technology Co., Ltd., stated that "the R&D of household beauty instruments should follow the development context of key technical indicators standardization, function and efficiency improvement, expansion of usage scenarios, visualization, and IoT applications, and ultimately provide users with a systematic solution for beauty and skin care."

Promoting industrial development through technological innovation cannot be separated from the cooperation and support of upstream enterprises in the industry chain. At this technical exchange meeting, Wang Junjun, a senior product technology expert at Hangzhou Ampru Film Technology Co., Ltd., introduced waterproof and breathable solutions for beauty and personal care electrical products; Kuang Gangyao, general manager of Shenzhen Zhongqu Motor Co., Ltd., gave a detailed explanation of the application and development of high-speed motors in hair dryers; Chen Jian, deputy director of the R&D center of Zhejiang Haishun Electric Co., Ltd., shared new technologies for beauty and personal care electrical appliance blades; and Zhang Yali, R&D manager of Shandong Pai Zhi New Energy Technology Co., Ltd., introduced product R&D achievements and technical directions for lithium batteries used in beauty and personal care electrical appliances.

A highly valuable technical exchange meeting reflects the technological innovation capabilities of the beauty and personal care appliance industry from one aspect. As Zhu Jun said at the meeting, we firmly believe that consumers' pursuit of beauty and health has not changed, their pursuit of quality and experience has not changed, and that innovation is the fundamental driving force for the progress of the industry. The beauty and personal care appliance industry is seeking long-term certainty from short-term uncertainty, adhering to technological innovation, and pursuing healthy and sustainable development.