On January 8, 2026, Eastmoney’s caifuhao platform published a detailed breakdown of Xiaohongshu’s new advertiser policy for Juguang (聚光), the platform’s core ad-buying engine. The update formalizes something that used to be handled case by case: advertisers are now split into three licensing tiers, ordinary categories, special categories, and high-risk categories, and cosmetics sits in the middle tier. Any brand running feed or search ads on Juguang for a cosmetics product must now submit a 化妆品备案凭证, the official cosmetics filing certificate, before the campaign is approved to run. Food, medical and education advertisers face the same special-tier requirement. Medical aesthetics and supplement brands sit one tier up, on a pre-review whitelist with a risk deposit attached.
What Juguang actually is, and why this update matters
Juguang is not a new product. It is Xiaohongshu’s unified paid-media engine, the tool that runs feed ads, search ads, video-stream ads, and full-site “smart” delivery (全站智能投放) across the platform. It sits next to, not on top of, the other tools in Xiaohongshu’s commercial stack: 蒲公英 (Pugongying) still handles KOL sourcing and collaboration payments, 灵犀 (Lingxi) still handles market research and audience data, and the newer 乘风 tool, launched in September 2024, folds in some of the merchant-side overlap with 千帆 for sellers running shoppable livestreams. Juguang’s job, specifically, is turning a 种草 (seeding) impression into a 拔草 (conversion) action, whether that action is a private-message form, a mini-program purchase, a product card click, or a redirect to Taobao, JD, or Xiaohongshu’s own RED Mall.
The licensing tiers are not the first tightening this cycle. A November 20, 2025 policy release, documented by ad-management platform Reditor, already reworked eleven features on Juguang: a new marketplace opened ad-boosting to creators under 1,000 followers, AIGC-generated ad creative became available to clients with recent spend history, and the standalone Juguang Lite mobile app was quietly discontinued. Two months later, the January update adds the compliance layer on top of that feature layer, banning absolute claims like “最” or “第一” in ad copy, banning landing pages that redirect to personal WeChat accounts or unregistered domains, and requiring ad creative to show a “genuine use scenario” rather than an exaggerated before-and-after.
Read together, the sequence tells a clear story. Xiaohongshu spent late 2025 opening Juguang up, more creators eligible, more automated creative tools, easier entry, and is now spending early 2026 closing the compliance gap that opening created. For a platform whose commercial pitch at its own December 2025 WILL conference was “种草，进入效果化时代” (seeding enters the performance era), this is the moment where “performance” stops meaning just conversion rate and starts meaning regulatory defensibility too. A cosmetics ad that converts well but cannot produce a valid 化妆品备案凭证 on request no longer runs, full stop.
What this changes for a beauty brand’s account, this quarter
The brands actually affected are narrower than the headline suggests. A brand already running compliant, NMPA-filed products in China with its paperwork in order sees almost no friction, the certificate already exists, it just needs to be attached to the Juguang account. The brands that get caught are the ones running ads for SKUs still mid-registration, gray-market imports without a completed filing, or claims that were written before this crackdown and never revisited.
We saw exactly this with a French skincare client last quarter. Their hero serum had a valid NMPA filing, but a companion eye cream launched three months later was still in process. The brand’s media buyer, unaware of the tier split, built the January media plan around both products together. The eye cream campaign was rejected at review, not paused, rejected, and the budget originally set aside for it sat unused for two weeks while the paperwork caught up. That two-week gap, during Chinese New Year shopping season, was the real cost, not the certificate itself.
The honest read: this is not a reason to panic, it is a reason to check your paperwork against your media calendar before you build it, not after a campaign gets flagged. Brands with three or four SKUs in different registration stages are the ones who need to audit this now, this quarter, while the rule is still new enough that account managers on the platform side are being lenient with warnings before rejections.
How to set up a Juguang account that survives this review
The mechanics, once the compliance question is settled, are straightforward. Juguang runs on an eCPM auction, bid multiplied by predicted click-through rate multiplied by predicted conversion rate, times a thousand, so a well-targeted, well-made ad genuinely does buy more reach per yuan than an untargeted one. Budget minimums sit around RMB 10,000 to 50,000 prepaid for a direct advertiser account, lower, often from RMB 5,000, when working through an approved agency channel. Targeting runs on industry, interest, geography down to a 3, 5 or 10 kilometer radius around a commercial district, age, gender, keyword intent, and, since the January 2026 update, lookalike audiences built from a competitor’s followers or content viewers.
For a foreign cosmetics brand, the sequence that avoids the eye-cream problem above looks like this. First, confirm the 化妆品备案凭证 status of every SKU going into the campaign, individually, not as a brand-level assumption. Second, set up the Juguang account itself, which for a foreign business does not require a Chinese business license, a foreign business registration is accepted for verification, but does require the special-category documents attached before the first ad unit is submitted for review. Third, build the funnel deliberately: feed and search ads for awareness, feeding into a product card or mini-program for the actual sale, rather than a generic landing page, which is exactly the kind of redirect the new policy now flags.
This is also where Juguang stops being a pure media-buying exercise and starts needing a content strategy behind it. An ad boosting a KOL note that already has organic traction converts at a different rate than an ad boosting brand-produced content cold, and pairing Juguang spend with an active Xiaohongshu content and KOL program is what separates campaigns that clear review smoothly from ones that get flagged for looking like an ad rather than a genuine post. Our KOL and KOC team builds that seeding layer specifically so the Juguang spend on top of it has something credible to amplify, not a cold, ad-only asset. For more background on how Xiaohongshu’s ecosystem fits into a broader China platform strategy, see our earlier piece on Rednotes as a rising social platform, and for a wider view of paid options across the Chinese internet, Marketing to China’s rundown of the country’s most effective ad platforms is worth reading alongside this one.
Some agencies are telling clients to pull back Juguang spend until the compliance dust settles. Others argue this is the best moment to lock in placements, because half the advertisers in your category are hesitating right now and inventory is temporarily less contested. Which side are you on, and is your paperwork actually ready either way?
