Beautifying selfies is big business in China and its most popular beauty app creators, Meitu

 XIAMEN, China August 4:At the southern Chinese headquarters of Meitu, the maker of some of the world’s most popular beauty apps, the selfie is also science.

Here in the company’s sparse, oh-so-start-up offices, tables of 20-somethings are using facial recognition and 3-D modeling to build a suite of apps that, quite literally, transform.

Their eye-widening, skin-lightening, chin-narrowing photo apps and “beautifying” video platform are ubiquitous in China, downloaded a billion times in total, according to the company. They are known by fans as “zipai shenqi,” or “godly tools for selfies.”

The company has hundreds of millions of monthly users, a valuation in the billions of dollars, according to estimates, and plans for global expansion. If you haven’t heard of Meitu, chances are, you will. If you’re reading this on your phone, watch this space.

The extraordinary popularity of Meitu says much about today’s China.

When Americans think about China’s Internet, many gravitate to one thing: censorship. While it’s true that the country’s Great Firewall keeps the Web here tightly controlled and painfully slow, Chinese tech firms are flourishing nonetheless, building products that capitalize on the spending power of a billion-plus consumers.

Meitu ,the company behind some of the world’s biggest beauty apps started out as something much humbler.

When Cai Wensheng and Wu Xinhong founded the company in 2008, “selfie” had yet to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Meitu was a desktop photo processor inspired by Google’s Picasa.

Bei Gou, a former portrait photographer who is now Meitu’s senior vice president for product, said the goal was to bring simple photo editing to China, allowing users to, say, quickly crop a shot of Shanghai’s skyline.

“Meitu sits at the intersection of two exploding forces: Chinese mobile use and rising Chinese women,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University in Beijing.

“I don’t know if they saw that coming, but they went with it.”

Meitu’s users “went with it,” too, sharing billions of selfies on their social and online dating accounts. The most devoted users, like Apple fanboys, form groups to share news and arrange offline meetups.

Zhu Tingting, a 24-year-old college senior from Nanjing, is among the fans who regularly attend Meitu events. She said, without irony, that Meitu changed her life. She spends about two hours a day taking selfies.

“Nowadays, when girls go out, it just means finding a place to take pictures and post them on social media,” she said.

Among the tools the company features: MeituPic, a one-touch beauty app that put Meitu on the map, Meipai, a video platform with flattering filters, and a line of souped-up cellphones with twin 21-megapixel cameras optimized for — you guessed it — selfies.

Meitu is expanding aggressively. Outside mainland China, it now has offices in Santa Monica and Palo Alto, Calif., and people on the ground in London; Mexico City; Tokyo; New Delhi; Singapore; Hong Kong; Taipei, Taiwan; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.