A 19-year-old woman wakes up at 4pm every day and has her make-up and hair done at a makeshift beauty salon.
It is just off a busy street dense with five-star hotels and nightclubs in Houjie town in Dongguan, Guangdong.
The stylist helps the teenager from Chongqing put on the trendy look - pink lip gloss and blue eye shadow - she sees in fashion magazines. It takes 40 minutes and costs 20 yuan (HK$23).
The beautician won't say so, but she knows her client is one of the army of 100,000 prostitutes working in the hotels, saunas, massage parlours and karaoke bars of this manufacturing heartland, notorious as China's sex capital for more than a decade. And the salons along that back street are kept in business mostly by those women.
The Shanghai Morning Post recently reported: 'Prostitutes in Dongguan have contributed a huge amount of revenue to many sectors, from jewellery shops to beauty salons, as well as hotels and sex shops, bringing some 40 billion yuan in revenue directly or indirectly to related service industries.' That would amount to roughly 10 per cent of Dongguan's gross domestic product last year.
The newspaper said the sex trade in the city had developed its own unwritten set of service standards, from detailed specifications for the facial expressions in the introductory striptease to how many times clients may achieve orgasm in a two-hour session, which costs between 400 and 2,000 yuan. Clients' feedback is highly valued by procurers; negative reviews could result in fees being withheld.