Photo/Shetuwang

Apr. 19 (NBD) -- Meitu Inc, the Chinese firm best known for its selfie image-enhancing app, said on Monday it is venturing into the skincare market, and the company will launch a face-cleansing brush "meituspa" with a price tag of 598 yuan on April 23.

The announcement came one day after the selfie touch-app developer unveiled the deal to exclusively license its Meitu phone brand to smartphone maker Xiaomi.

With customers increasingly in pursuit of beauty, facial cleansing devices have become one of the most popular beauty appliances. Household appliance manufacturers and cosmetics companies, in succession, released assorted facial cleansing apparatus.

Data from market research firm Euromonitor International indicates that facial cleanser sales in China rose to 2.4 billion yuan (358 million U.S. dollars) in 2017 from 1.27 billion yuan in 2014 and is expected to hit 3.17 billion yuan in 2022.

The "meituspa" facial cleanser is not the first smart hardware product that Meitu launches in the skin-care sector. As early as June last year, Meitu launched the "beautymore" skin detector.

When contacted by NBD regarding future plans, Meitu said that the company will continue pushing skin-care hardware to the market, open to the possibility of developing basic and functional skin-care products so as to meet the fine-sorted demands.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn