A white-label cosmetics company was ordered to pay damages for using top celebrity Yan Haoxiang's portrait without permission, spotlighting the legal risks of brand lookalikes in China's e-commerce sector.
In the mid-2026 arena where livestream e-commerce and private-domain traffic collide in pixel-level hand-to-hand combat, white-label cosmetics brands, desperate to extract free dividends from the hyper-competitive fan economy, often tread the tightrope of regulatory compliance. Recently, Tianyancha legal litigation information revealed that Guangzhou YUQI Cosmetics Co., Ltd. has been added as a party subject to enforcement, with an enforcement target of RMB 62,300, enforced by the Third People's Court of Dongguan City.
The reason this modestly sized compulsory execution strikes a nerve with the public is that it stems from a case where an established white-label manufacturer used "borderline imitation" to infringe on the rights of top-tier celebrity Yan Haoxiang, ultimately suffering a complete legal backlash with a real-world bill to pay.
The public and some unofficial self-media outlets tend to frame this dispute as a typical reputation rights clash in the entertainment industry, dismissing it as an isolated use of imagery by a merchant. However, in a competitive environment where monetization is rapidly shifting downward, any minor infringement crack is a visible manifestation of grassroots ambition pushing upward.
For a long time, white-label cosmetics companies and online store sellers at the bottom of the supply chain have been mired in financial anxiety over stagnant growth. To bypass the hefty endorsement fees of top celebrities, which often run into the millions, these merchants developed a savvy, asset-light customer acquisition playbook—without securing formal brand authorization or signed sovereign credit agreements, they would repeatedly feature celebrity Yan Haoxiang's likeness and promotional materials in their e-commerce posters and livestream clips, even going so far as to deliberately craft misleading memes and out-of-context clips to deceive consumers. This crude attempt to exploit celebrity influence for marginal gains essentially trades high infringement risk against the inability to build genuine technological barriers for their products.
As the full weight of the legal judgment and enforcement network came down, the capital foundation of the implicated company at the industrial and commercial level also revealed stark, jarring flaws under Tianyancha's risk radar.
The Tianyancha App shows that in July 2025, Guangzhou YUQI Cosmetics Co., Ltd. had already received a civil judgment via public announcement from the Beijing Internet Court in the network infringement liability dispute filed by Yan Haoxiang. The first-instance defendant was ordered to publish a public apology for 48 consecutive hours and pay compensation. However, from the Beijing announcement in 2025 to becoming an enforcement target at the Third People's Court of Dongguan in mid-2026, this legal back-and-forth, quietly recorded in the Tianyancha archive, has completely shattered the illusion of some white-label giants that they could delay or dodge payment before the law.
This latest enforcement record reveals a saturation-style, institutional crackdown that contemporary celebrity legal teams have honed against long-tail infringers.
Some opportunistic merchants once believed that even if they lost in court, they could employ a "dead pig unafraid of scalding water" strategy to stall enforcement, turning the judgment into a dead letter and building a financial firewall through information asymmetry. But in an era of digital justice and penetrating credit audits tightening the noose, celebrity studios have long established pixel-level tracking and enforcement know-how. The RMB 60,000-plus enforcement target in Tianyancha is not an abstract figure; it is a credit noose that can directly freeze a company's operating accounts and saddle its legal representative with a court-ordered credit blacklist and travel restrictions. This compulsory bill has directly settled and liquidated all the illicit premium the manufacturer had reaped through its borderline tactics.
Business and market evolution have always been ruthless. In a cycle where survival is defined by legal credit, online ecosystem compliance, and absolute regulatory adherence, the era of fly-by-night operators who leech off celebrity likenesses and generate black-market traffic to squeeze marginal gains has already exited the stage prematurely.
The latest enforcement scar left on Guangzhou YUQI's Tianyancha record sounds a death knell for all traditional workshops trying to relieve financial suffocation through edge-case scheming. With the combined might of big-name legal artillery and court enforcement, no entity enjoys absolute immunity. How to align internal operational nerve endings with the hard line of absolute compliance is the costly tuition these traditional giants, accustomed to unbridled growth, must pay before returning to a normal business trajectory.
