Does the curse of top-stream live-commerce fail to work on Jiang Chenglan, the new top female influencer of Douyin?

There is a repeatedly verified curse in the livestream e-commerce industry: once top streamers who were extremely popular in their heyday stop broadcasting or get caught up in controversies, they can hardly regain their peak performance after their comeback.

Luo Wangyu, the top beauty influencer on Douyin, resumed livestreaming after the product-related controversy, and the GMV of his first livestream during the 2024 Double 11 period dropped by 87% year-on-year. Several core streamers under the Sanzhiyang brand collectively resumed broadcasting, and the peak number of viewers in the most popular streamer Zui Ge's live room was only about 15,000, a sharp drop from the over 100,000+ viewers at their peak.

Li Jiaqi announced a temporary suspension of livestreaming, Xinba announced his fifth withdrawal from the internet, and Wei Ya has long stepped back from the front line. The judgment that "there will be no more super top streamers" in the industry has almost become a consensus in the past two years.

But Jiang Chenglan seems to be an exception.

On May 13, 2026, she, who had stopped updating content for three years, reopened her account under her real name. She gained about 2.4 million new followers within 4 hours after her first comeback video was released, and the number of new followers exceeded 13 million in 5 days. On September 15, her first livestream for product sales recorded over 10 million cumulative views, with total sales exceeding 10 million RMB, surpassing the live room under Dong Yuhui to rank first on Douyin's overall livestream sales chart. Two days later, she took the first place on Xiaohongshu's buyer livestream sales chart using the same strategy.

A week before the livestream, she was just restricted from high-consumption activities due to a brokerage contract dispute with her former company, with the enforced payment amount exceeding 11.19 million RMB. It is very rare in the history of livestream e-commerce in recent years that she completed her first livestream and topped the sales rankings while being in debt and subject to high-consumption restrictions.

01

Others compete for the lowest price across the whole platform, while she focuses on "the first makeup set for beginners"

The core product of this first livestream is a makeup set priced at 286 RMB, containing 9 individual items from 9 different brands including Dear Mom, Timage, KATO, Carslan, Bioderma and so on. The total normal retail price of these products exceeds 880 RMB.

It is almost unprecedented for beauty influencers to co-brand with 9 brands at one time to launch a combined set. The product selection coordination, brand game and pricing negotiation involved are far more complex than the operation of conventional livestreaming.

More critically, it is about trade-offs: the set deliberately does not include foundation and concealer. Jiang Chenglan explained that individual differences in foundation shade and makeup effect are too large to be recommended in a one-size-fits-all packaged way. This decision means giving up the best-selling large-volume single products, in exchange for strictly maintaining the "beginner-friendly" positioning.

And "beginners" are exactly Jiang Chenglan's most core user assets. Data from Dadodo shows that the portraits of her account followers, livestream viewers and video viewers are highly similar: most of them are female users in first-tier cities aged 24-30, accounting for more than 62%.

Since the "Cheng Shi'an" era, her content has been known for systematic tutorials such as "zoned makeup setting method" and "bone contour highlighting", and is regarded by a large number of users as the first teacher for makeup beginners. Her Taobao store "Cheng Shi'an's Store" still has more than 7 million followers to date. These users did not come for the low price of a single livestream, they are the people who learned to draw their first eyebrow following her tutorials.

In the context of livestream e-commerce, this relationship has a more accurate description: pre-positioned trust. Users' trust in products is built on long-term recognition of the recommender's professional ability, rather than on instant judgment of prices.

Before the livestream started, she released a detailed product review video in advance, breaking down each step from usage procedures to on-face effects, so that fans completed the first two stages of "understanding the product - generating interest" before entering the live room, and the live room only needs to take over the final step of "placing an order".

This is completely different from the model of most product sales streamers on the market, where product promotion is concentrated in the live room, and users need to complete the whole process from cognition to purchase within a few hours.

The recovery speed of her commercial value can also be seen from the timeline of brand cooperation. Within only three months after her comeback, she successively became Estée Lauder's "Mist Grass Promoter" and Bioderma's brand repair spokesperson, and launched cooperation with brands such as L'Oréal Paris and NARS. The identity transition from "product recommender" to "brand image ambassador" is not common among beauty influencers.

At the same time, the entire beauty livestream ecosystem is undergoing structural changes.

In the first quarter of 2026, 85% of the top 20 beauty brands on Douyin saw a decline in the proportion of influencer promotion, with the maximum decline close to 20 percentage points. Brands such as Kans, Marubi and CHANDO continue to reduce the scale of influencer livestreaming, while Blue Moon and Three Squirrels even directly cut off their influencer livestream teams.

In the first half of 2026, the number of Douyin e-commerce store livestreams with transaction volume exceeding 10 million RMB increased by 78% year-on-year. Brand self-livestreaming is replacing influencer livestreaming and becoming the core sales channel for beauty brands.

Brands are systematically withdrawing from influencer live rooms. The requirements for high slot fees, high commissions and the lowest price across the whole platform have long eroded brand profits, while the traffic always belongs to the influencers, and brands cannot precipitate their own user assets.

At the same time, the sales volume of brand store livestreams has accounted for nearly 90% of Douyin e-commerce transaction share. A livestream e-commerce pattern dominated by brand self-livestreaming is taking shape at an accelerated pace.

This means that the competition logic of influencer product sales has undergone fundamental changes. When brands no longer need influencers to "drive sales", the only value influencers can provide is persuasion.

The source of persuasion is shifting from "the lowest price across the whole platform" to "I know better than you who this product is suitable for".

Jiang Chenglan's set strategy just hit this turning point. She did not forcefully include foundation, because she judged that her user group is dominated by beginners, and the trial and error cost of foundation products is too high. She chose "error-proof" categories such as primer, loose powder, eyeliner and makeup remover, and used the combination of 9 brands to cover the complete process of a beginner from base makeup to makeup removal.

This is not so much "selling goods" as "matching goods". The difference is that the former takes transaction as the end point, while the latter takes usage experience as the starting point.

02

Operate as an IP on Douyin, and work as a buyer on Xiaohongshu

Putting the outflow of senior executives and "paid audience posing for shooting" together, we can find that they point to the same problem: the organizational inertia of Ping An Life has deformed under the pressure of growth.

There are significant differences in the e-commerce logic between Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Douyin adopts the pan-entertainment drainage and sales model, driven by algorithms, with high efficiency of traffic allocation, but the connection between users and creators is relatively weak. Xiaohongshu focuses on vertical content seeding, and its buyers evolve from native creators, with stronger fan stickiness, but there are still shortcomings in the breadth of product portfolio and supply chain infrastructure.

Douyin's GMV has exceeded 1.4 trillion RMB, while Xiaohongshu's GMV is only hundreds of billions RMB, with a huge gap in volume. However, the trust-driven consumption relationship on Xiaohongshu is more consistent with Jiang Chenglan's model of building trust through professional content. Simultaneously holding the first livestream on both platforms shows that she is trying to find the greatest common divisor in two different e-commerce ecosystems.

On Douyin, Jiang Chenglan's advantage lies in traffic efficiency, and the over 10 million views of her first livestream verified her algorithm appeal as a top IP. On Xiaohongshu, her advantage lies in content matching: beauty tutorials and buyer recommendations are naturally isomorphic, and users enter the live room from Xiaohongshu notes, with a shorter conversion path.

The two platforms give her different levers, but they pry the same cornerstone: the professional trust accumulated over the past three years.

During her absence, the beauty content ecosystem has experienced a drastic transformation from "tutorial influencers" to "livestream influencers". A large number of creators shifted their energy from content quality to livestream frequency, from product analysis to price negotiation. Jiang Chenglan did not participate in this process, so her content assets retained a kind of "undiluted" state.

When she returned under her real name, users were faced with a familiar face, a familiar set of methodologies, and a field that she had never really left: teaching ordinary people how to do makeup.

Jiang Chenglan's comeback has an unavoidable realistic background.

The dispute between her and her former company finally ended in her losing the lawsuit. She was sentenced to pay compensation of more than 10 million RMB, and lost the ownership of the "Cheng Shi'an" account. She started from scratch under her real name, accumulated nearly 20 million followers in four months, and then started livestreaming to sell products.

She herself said in the livestream that in order to push the price of the set down to 286 RMB, she gave up part of her future commercial rights and interests. This means that the profit margin of the first livestream may be much thinner than the outside world sees.

The golden age of top influencer livestreaming is coming to an end, and the brand self-livestreaming system is maturing. In this transition period, the value of influencer product sales no longer depends on how much GMV they can bring, but on whether they can play an irreplaceable role between brands and consumers: a product-savvy recommender, and a trustworthy filter.

The success of Jiang Chenglan's debut is beyond doubt, but the history of livestream e-commerce has never been short of stories of falling after reaching the peak.

Wei Xue once topped Douyin's beauty category list at the end of 2024, with an average sales volume of 10 million to 25 million RMB per live stream in nearly 30 days. Earlier, streamers such as Zhang Ting and Zhu Guagua were successively titled "the number one sister on Douyin", but most of them failed to maintain this position for a long time.

The frequency of super top streamer succession reflects the deep-seated characteristics of this industry: the right to allocate traffic is in the hands of the platforms, consumers' attention is shifting rapidly, and the interest game between brands and influencers continues to exist.

Instant popularity depends on momentum, while long-term prosperity depends on system. This problem is not only being solved by Jiang Chenglan.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Super Focus foci", the author is Gu Deman, and 36Kr is authorized to release it.