It’s 9 a.m. in mid-July, and Luo Yan starts her daily sun protection routine. First the 22-year-old college undergraduate takes out a sunscreen designed specifically for sensitive skin and applies it slowly and evenly on her face and arms. Wearing a white dress today, she selects matching beige sun protection clothing, along with a rosy sun face mask as a contrast. She sets off, sun umbrella in hand, soon to cross paths with a torrent of other umbrella-toting young students like herself.

“I want to protect my skin,” she says, her voice all seriousness. “For vulnerable skin like mine, ‘hard’ sun protection is more essential than the ‘soft’ kind.”

Luo is just one of the thousands of spokes in a wheel of a Chinese sun protection market that is rolling ahead with scorching speed. In China alone, the market was worth a blinding 27 billion yuan ($3.9 billion) in 2021, according to China Insights Consultancy, which estimated sun protection sales will grow at an annual rate of 9.4% to reach 95.8 billion yuan by 2026.