Asia's Lipstick Lads - (Need I say any more?!)

HONG KONG -- The new face of cosmetics ads in Asia is soft, delicate -- and male.

Lounging in a pink apartment in a television commercial for Able C&C Inc.'s South Korean makeup brand Missha, actor Won Bin leans in as if to kiss a woman sitting next to him -- but he does her bidding instead, taking her dusky-colored lipstick and carefully applying it to her lips.

In an ad for skin-care chain The Face Shop, ruby-lipped film star Kwon Sang Woo nuzzles a berry tree, then dons a crown of leaves. Mr. Kwon, famous for six-pack abs and a slight lisp, "has a kind of neutral gender," says Scott Han, the company's public-relations director. "Our customers think he is healthy and adorable."

THE NEW FACE OF BEAUTY 1 • An actor applies lipstick to a model's lips in the Missha commercial2.   • A film star nuzzles a berry tree in The Face Shop's new ad3.   • A woman receives a special delivery in DHC's cosmetics spot4.   (Windows Media Player is required5.)

Marketers aren't out to poke fun at the lipstick lads of Asia. Instead, they are pushing shampoos and makeup by tapping into a powerful shift in gender images taking place in a number of developed East Asian countries. The conservative, macho male stereotypes that have long dominated society in countries like Japan and South Korea are falling out of fashion. Women are gaining power and independence and expressing a preference for different kinds of men.

"A pretty face with big eyes and fair skin, and a moderately masculine body, are what Korean women want in men these days," says Rhie Hye Young, a spokeswoman for Missha.

Women's entry en masse into Asia's work force, 20 years in the making, has begun to close a centuries-old gap between women's and men's behavior and resources. For the first time, legions of Asian women now earn their own money and demand independent lives. Divorce rates are soaring. Marketers, eager to cater to the emboldened and free-spending female cohort, say it is softer male images that woo the new women of Asia.

Among the new kind of men in Asian cosmetics ads is film star Kwon Sang Woo for The Face Shop.

So, art -- well, advertising -- imitates life. In Japan, boys do cry -- no fewer than eight of them, in a recent TV spot, all top actors and all weeping at full tilt. They are victims of a beautiful, sly woman who shows up at the end of the commercial sporting a devil's tail. The guys' sob story pushed market share up 15% for Procter & Gamble Co.'s women's shampoo Vidal Sassoon. In a follow-up campaign, miniature versions of the actors wooing the sexy woman are literally forced to dance in the palm of her hand.

In Hong Kong, an ad for mail-order brand DHC Corp. features a woman repeatedly ordering a cosmetics shipment, requiring multiple visits from a doe-eyed DHC delivery man played by Chinese pop star Jay Chou.

Further, women now can act in ways that traditionally only men could. In past ads for items like alcoholic beverages, men were shown choosing women at will, just as they chose products. "Whiskey was associated with women, who got picked and consumed by men," says Park Kyung Do, a marketing professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. "Today, male models are used to advertise women's cosmetics products for the same logic. This time, women are in the position to pick men."

Korea's largest ad agency, Cheil Communications, in a recent report labels the new style of man "Mr. Beauty" and cites the desire of his counterpart, "Ms. Strong," to be in control. One Cheil ad for the SamsungCard credit card shows a vixen slapping the rear ends of passersby -- until she realizes that one of her victims, a police officer, is also a woman.

Tiny dancers for Vidal Sassoon.

"The men are kind of like marionettes," says Mamoru Morita, a creative director for Tokyo's Beacon Communications. "Women can play with them." Beacon, a joint venture of Japan's Dentsu Inc. and France's Publicis Groupe SA that represents Publicis's Leo Burnett in Japan, is the ad agency behind the weepy fellows of Vidal Sassoon.

The trend appears to have started with a 1996 Japanese commercial for the launch of a Kanebo lipstick that featured pop singer Takuya Kimura putting pink women's lipstick on himself. A voiceover beckoned: "Come attack with Super Lip." Sales outstripped the company's projections threefold in two months.

"Girls much more prefer to choose pretty boys," says Mr. Park, noting that the pretty boys are most often used in ads for inexpensive women's brands targeting youth.

Few in Asia think the men in these ads are gay -- an assumption that got the U.S.-based Details magazine in trouble in April of last year when it ran a feature highlighting cultural stereotypes shared by gay men and Asian men. After Asian-American activists picketed the Details office in New York, the magazine's editor, Daniel Peres, printed an apology.

Instead, while acceptance of homosexuality varies in Asian cultures, it doesn't occur to most Asians to assume that a man with some feminine qualities is gay. A survey late last year by Cheil found that more than 66% of men and 57% of women under 40 were living self-described "androgynous" lifestyles -- with men having more traditionally female traits, and women having more traditionally male ones, than they might have years ago. But the respondents didn't link that with sexual orientation. There's a nickname, the "flower men," for the gentler sons of Korea's stolid patriarchs, but the term carries no more opprobrium than Western terms like metrosexual.

Actor Won Bin for Missha lipstick.

The new ad images, while sometimes humorous, reflect other deep, relatively recent changes in many Asian societies. In the past decade, Asia has seen a financial crisis and a powerful snapback, as well as the seemingly endless throes of an infamous recession in Japan. Men and the monuments they built -- from the corporate Japanese behemoths to Korea's sprawling chaebols -- were chastened, or at the very least changed, and sons began to reject their fathers' verities and images.

In Korea, for example, economic jolts like these "revealed the weakness of the Korean economy, built mainly by Korean men," says Jaehang Park, an account planning chief at Cheil.

Old gender roles, good and bad, haven't entirely gone away. Earlier this month, Tokyo had to add special subway cars for women so they could ride without fear of being groped, a serious problem in Japan.

But in the pages of the magazines and flashing across the screens, the change among young men is unmistakable. One ad for Somang Cosmetics Co.'s Color Lotion featured two male celebrities, one shirtless, bumping into each other and then slowly admiring each other's faces. "What skin!" says one man. Another ad, for LG Household & Health Care Ltd.'s Vonin men's makeup, had actor Jang Dong Gun nuzzling and kissing an image of himself.

"We have taken [it] a step further and say that it's all right, and even cool, for men to be interested in their appearance," says Park Hye Ran, a creative director with WPP Group PLC's LG Ad Inc. in Korea, which developed the Vonin campaign.

Indeed, men have shown that they are willing to change their appearance to project the new kind of manliness women want. While hair dyes have been quietly popular with older male Korean and Japanese politicians for years, today some male executives in those countries stride the corridors of power in skin-tone makeup.

"Now, men don't giggle at the sight of facial scrub," says Linda Kovarik, an executive planning director at Beacon Communications. "These guys are way past soap on a rope."