Whose Tradition Is It? TCM, the Beauty Industry, and the Question Worth Sitting With

The numbers around Traditional Chinese Medicine in beauty are no longer fringe. The global TCM skincare market sat at USD $1.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD $2.5 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 8.8% from 2026 onward (Verified Market Reports). Asia Pacific holds roughly 45% of current revenue, with North America at 25% and Europe trailing close behind at 20%. The ingredients driving the curve will sound familiar to anyone scrolling a beauty feed over the past twelve months (snow mushroom, ginseng, pearl powder, licorice root, goji berry), and the tools driving the visual story (gua sha, jade, bian stone) have moved from acupuncture clinic to skincare cabinet to TikTok dashboard with a velocity that the underlying tradition has spent centuries earning.

There is a story underneath the story, and it is one the professional industry is being asked to consider with more deliberation than it has been to date. The tension is not whether TCM works, or whether it deserves the global platform it is now receiving. It sits squarely with who is doing the work, who is doing the selling, and whether the lineage behind these practices is being credited or stripped out for shelf space.

Some of the most consistent voices on this question come from practitioners who have spent years in formal training. Sydney-based acupuncturist Jaclyn McPherson, a TCM practitioner of over a decade, has described the rebranding of gua sha and jade rollers as Western "innovation" as straightforwardly disrespectful, pointing to evidence of these tools existing within Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and the medicine itself for thousands. New York TCM practitioner Sandra Lanshin Chiu has spent years on the same point, noting that a Google image search on gua sha pulls predominantly non-Asian faces, with Chinese medicine practitioners themselves in the minority. The follower-count gap is the more uncomfortable detail in the conversation. Gua sha brands run by founders with direct cultural and clinical lineage often sit at a few thousand followers, while Western-owned wellness brands built on the same modality reach into the hundreds of thousands.

It is worth holding the question honestly, because the answer is rarely binary. Cultural exchange is not, on its own, appropriation. Practices travel. Modalities cross borders, and TCM has been crossing those borders for decades, often led by Asian-trained practitioners doing the teaching themselves. The line that matters tends to sit elsewhere, around training, attribution, and where the commercial benefit ultimately lands. A clinic offering gua sha as part of a facial protocol delivered by a trained therapist who can speak to the modality's origins is in a very different conversation to a salon adding "lymphatic gua sha" to the menu after a half-day workshop because it is moving on social.

For Australian operators specifically, there is a regulatory layer in this conversation that often goes overlooked, and it is the layer that matters most commercially. Chinese medicine and acupuncture were brought into the national regulatory framework in July 2012, regulated by the Chinese Medicine Board of Australia and AHPRA, with practitioners required to hold approved education in both Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Health Sciences (typically a four-year Bachelor degree or higher), private indemnity insurance, association membership, current first aid training, criminal history checks, English language testing, and annual continuing professional education points. This sits under the Title Protection model in the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, which means the use of those titles is not a branding choice but a registration question.

What that means in practical terms is that a salon or skin clinic adding TCM-inflected treatments to its menu has both a cultural and a legal question to answer at the same time. The cultural one is whether the lineage and the practitioners are being credited, paid, and centred in how the offering is built. The legal one is whether the language being used on the treatment menu lines up with the protected scope of practice. Both questions point in the same commercial direction, which is partnership over imitation. Co-developed treatment offerings with registered TCM practitioners, brand collaborations with Asian-trained founders, training programs that name the source rather than rebrand it.

The market is not slowing, and the growth forecast is the easiest part of this story. The harder and ultimately more interesting part for operators is the one underneath it, which is what kind of industry the professional channel wants to be on the other side of the boom. The answer will sit in the smaller decisions: who is credited on the treatment menu, who is paid for the IP that built it, who is platformed when the social content goes live, and whether the protocols on offer have the training (and in some cases the registration) standing behind them. The work TCM has done over thousands of years is durable enough to survive the trend cycle. The question is whether the industry packaging it can show the same level of care.