Chapter 66

Ni Xing blinked. "Really? Why? It sounded good the way she put it."

Li Lan explained. "The main things in that toner are saponins, lutein and carotene. It conditions the skin, calms mild inflammation and helps stop spots leaving marks. You haven't got spots and you haven't got inflammation, so it isn't a particularly good fit."

Ni Xing's skin was in decent condition; apart from having gone brown, there wasn't much wrong with it, and a calendula toner wouldn't do a great deal for her.

None of what Li Lan had said was obscure — a few years on, once people started reading ingredient lists, it would be common knowledge. At this point, though, even a counter assistant knew what a product did and no more; ask which ingredients did what and only a very experienced one could have told you.

So Xia Yanyan and Luo Yu came over, curious, and Xia Yanyan asked, interested, "Li Lan, how do you know what all those ingredients do? Do pharmacy students all know that?"

Which is a point: the four of them shared a room but not a subject, and however the university had arranged it, the four of them came from three different faculties. Li Lan was in pharmacy; Ni Xing and Luo Yu were both in business studies; and quiet-seeming Xia Yanyan was in computing.

"More or less. They're fairly common ingredients, so I remember them." Li Lan smiled.

"Then, Lanlan — you said it suits people with inflammation and spots. Doesn't that mean it's right for me?" Xia Yanyan was interested. She had spots, and she trusted the brand anyway; she simply hadn't used this line and didn't know what it did. From the sound of it, it might be exactly right, and if it worked she'd buy it.

Li Lan checked that the assistant was some way off and said quietly, "Actually I wouldn't recommend it for you either. You could use it — but think about it. The petals in there are fresh, and keeping them that way means preservatives and so on. It doesn't matter much, but the calendula cream would probably suit you better than the toner."

That startled her. Preservatives sounded rather alarming — though it made sense; you'd hardly keep the petals from rotting without them.

Knowing better than to say so in the shop, she kept her voice down too. "I see. I won't buy the toner, then. Honestly, I'm always getting spots. I don't know when it'll stop, I've been through so many products." By the end she couldn't help sighing.

The other two were more interested still. "Lanlan, what should the two of us be using? Is there anything we should watch out for?"

"The thing is that skincare has to suit your own skin. Luo Yu, yours is on the dry side. You won't notice much while it's summer, but come autumn and winter it flakes easily, and Beijing is so dry — so buy things with strong hydration." Li Lan explained it carefully. She'd made a point of learning a fair amount about this since the shop appeared, and it was all elementary; none of it was difficult for her.

Luo Yu nodded hard. "Yes — every autumn my face feels dry, and it did even using my mother's things. I thought it was because I don't drink enough water. It's that?"

"Lanlan, Lanlan, what about me? What should I use to go paler?" Ni Xing asked urgently, finding her reasoning sound.

Not only her. The other two were very interested in whitening as well. "Yes, I nearly forgot what we came for. What do you do about going paler?"

Li Lan hadn't expected the subject to catch all three of them like this. Everybody wants to be good-looking. "People are wrong about whitening, actually. It doesn't happen quickly, and what's called whitening won't make you paler than you are — it takes you back to your own skin tone. Genuinely going paler takes an enormous amount of work; skincare alone won't do it in a few months."

"That's outrageous." Understanding dawned. "So the adverts saying one bottle makes you paler are all lies? I did wonder why my mother never looked any paler after using it for years. Ha. Taken in."

Li Lan hadn't expected quite such a direct verdict and didn't know what to say to it. "Er — they're not entirely useless. And it's normal for advertising to overstate."

Xia Yanyan blinked at her. "Back to my own tone would do. Training really did darken me — my arms and my face aren't the same colour any more. Lanlan, never mind all the rest, we don't understand any of it. Just tell us what to buy. We trust you."

"Mm." The others looked at her with the same trust. Today had taught them that you can't simply buy skincare at random — whitening, hydration, there was a great deal in it.

"But skincare isn't medicine. I'll recommend things, but whether they suit you and whether you buy them is your decision." No trouble recommending; still, better said plainly than not, to avoid trouble later.

Ni Xing knew her best and laughed. "Don't worry, we know. We're buying anyway, and your recommendation beats us guessing. Medicine doesn't always work when you're ill, never mind skincare."

The other two nodded.

Seeing all three agree, Li Lan checked the time. She had a meeting with the year tutor that afternoon about module choices, and there was plenty of it. "Right. Let's not stay in this one shop. Other brands have very good things too — we might as well look."

She'd be going into cosmetics sooner or later. Buying a few things and getting a sense of what was on the market was ordinary market research.

---

They got back at three, four hours after leaving at eleven. Taking off an hour for lunch, they'd spent nearly three in the shopping centre — and had a great deal to show for it, each returning in a very good mood with two bags.

Having the tutor to see, Li Lan dropped her things and went straight out, and it was then that the other three learned that first-years though they all were, she'd already done a year.

"That's why your name sounded familiar. One of the boys from my school who did the maths competition talked about you." Told she'd come in on recommendation, Xia Yanyan suddenly understood what had been nagging at her.

She was from Hengshui No. 1, where a boy in the year above had entered last year's competition and been recommended to Tsinghua's maths department. When the school magazine interviewed him, he'd said regretfully that the one in their squad who took the world championship was a first-year from Yu city — and that she'd been recommended not to maths or physics but to a faculty nobody had expected.

"Yes, he said pharmacy. That fits. It was you." Xia Yanyan looked delighted at the coincidence.

"Was it?" Li Lan hadn't expected to run into a schoolmate of last year's teammate, let alone share a room with her. It was a coincidence.

"No wonder you know all that about skincare. You've been studying it a year." The other two understood, having assumed a year of the subject was where the ingredients came from.

Li Lan nodded and headed for the door. "Something like that. I need to see our tutor, though. We'll talk when I'm back."

The teaching arrangements went smoothly, mainly because the lecturers and the department heads all knew her situation, and the lecturers knew she'd been through the material once — though she hadn't sat the exams, having only been sitting in. So they agreed she needn't attend, and need only come for examinations.

Coming out, she breathed out. Term had brought one thing after another. Registering a company requires proof of business premises, so next she had to find somewhere. The tenancy agreement was the official reason, but she genuinely did need a place to run experiments; the laboratory was excellent and came with rather too many restrictions.

Then the agency and the registration, which wasn't complicated — she only had to provide documents, and had put a set together over the summer from what she'd found online. Then Monday, and settling the final draft of the paper with Dr Zhang, and confirming her second-year modules. Thank goodness she didn't have to sit through the first year again; the thought alone made her scalp prickle.

Early the next morning she took an address she'd found online to an agency of reasonable size. She needed to establish first whether she was even eligible; renting somewhere and then finding she wasn't would be a waste.

The man who dealt with her looked at her ID. "Eighteen in July this year. So yes, you can register a company. Are you sure you want a one-person limited company, though? That means putting up a hundred thousand in registered capital in one payment."

She nodded. "Yes. If I qualify, what else do you need from me?"

He nodded back. Registering a company the moment you came of age was unusual, though not unheard of; plenty of rich men's children had several companies to their name at eighteen. Mostly it was an older relative who came in to ask, and rarely anybody on their own. Assuming she was much the same, he took a sheet from a folder and passed it over. "That's the list of what's required. Have a look and ask if anything's unclear."

She read it, found it much what she'd seen online, and handed over what she'd prepared. "I've put those together. See whether they're right. The address isn't settled — if there's nothing wrong with these, I'll start looking for premises."

He went through them, and at one of the documents asked, "These are fine. You're a university student at the moment?"

She nodded.

He thought about it. "Then it's easier still. Find out whether your university has a graduate enterprise scheme. If it does, this will all be more straightforward, and you'll get a subsidy on the rent as well. It should save you a fair amount."