Hong Kong sugar babies, Singapore sugar daddies – but it’s NOT about selling sex, these dating websites insist
Designer labels, magic bank accounts, parties in Kuala Lumpur. It’s all part of life for a Hongkonger with a sugar daddy. But as websites cash in on the lifestyle trend, experts warn such experiences can be bittersweet
Lily is not your average university student. Even among the young Hongkonger’s crowd of affluent friends, her reputation for conspicuous consumption raises eyebrows.
She flies business class, sports handbags by Chanel and Hermès, takes foreign trips once every two weeks and, as if by magic, every month thousands of dollars appear in her bank account. Her last birthday party, held in one of Kuala Lumpur’s finest clubs, cost US$10,000. Naturally, her friends flew in from Hong Kong, Singapore and Jakarta and stayed at the finest hotels – on Lily’s tab. At 22, Lily has not yet finished her accountancy degree at a private university in Malaysia, but is already living the life of a high-flying finance professional. How? She is being bankrolled by a 40-year-old sugar daddy.
‘I trafficked women at a famous Hong Kong nightclub’
Lily met him on The SugarBook website, one of a host of recently launched “sugar dating” sites pursuing aggressive expansion plans in Hong Kong, mainland China and Southeast Asia. They have been together since February last year, an encouraging sign since things didn’t work out with Lily’s last two sugar daddies. Finally, things appear to be going smoothly.
When she wraps up her studies in June, she will take a gap year in Europe, basing herself in a posh house in the fashionable London borough of Camden, owned by her sugar daddy, an expat accountant in Singapore. Still, he’s not making everything easy – he refuses to hire Lily at his company, to avoid a conflict of interest. “My sugar daddy says I have to start from the bottom but he can make a few phone calls for me to get me a job for sure,” Lily says. “I love that I am with a man who is so sure about us and about the future and I know I cannot find that in a boy.”
Along with relationship security there are, of course, the sweeteners – the iPhone, Macbook Pro, and business class flights on Emirates he has lavished on her – or the Hermès Birkin 30 bag he bought her in Paris.