The Ultimate Celebrity Lookalike
Hey everyone! There’s a wild story making the rounds online here in Korea, and it’s one of those tales that sounds like it’s straight out of a movie. It’s about a 31-year-old Chinese woman named He Chengxi who wanted to look just like one of China’s biggest and most beautiful actresses, Fan Bingbing. And when I say she *wanted* to look like her, I mean she was seriously committed. Between 2008 and 2016, she reportedly spent a whopping 8 million yuan—that’s about $1.1 million USD or 1.7 billion Korean won—on 37 different plastic surgeries to copy Fan Bingbing’s face. [2, 4]
‘Little Fan Bingbing’ Gets Famous
For a time, her investment totally paid off! After all those procedures, she looked so much like the real star that she got famous herself. She appeared on a singing competition show in 2016 and earned the nickname ‘Little Fan Bingbing.’ She started getting invited to events and even landed small roles in movies. In a truly bizarre twist, she started dating and eventually married one of her plastic surgeons, who had also apparently had surgery to look like Fan Bingbing’s boyfriend at the time! [4, 8] They were marketed as a ‘copycat celebrity couple.’ It seemed like she had successfully transformed her entire life by changing her face.
When Your Idol Has a Scandal
Here’s where everything took a sharp turn. In 2018, the real Fan Bingbing was hit with a massive tax evasion scandal. She was fined an astronomical amount of money (like, over $100 million USD!) and was basically blacklisted from the Chinese entertainment industry. Suddenly, being Fan Bingbing’s lookalike wasn’t so great anymore. Since He Chengxi’s entire fame was built on looking like a now-disgraced celebrity, the public turned on her. She became the target of online jokes and ridicule, and her career opportunities completely vanished. [6, 8] It was a brutal case of being famous for the wrong reason at the worst possible time.
Starting Over
So, what happened to her? He Chengxi ended up getting a divorce from her husband and has since tried to reclaim her own identity. Reports say she even had more surgeries to look *less* like Fan Bingbing. [6, 7] Today, she has reinvented herself as a fashion influencer and blogger, with around 330,000 followers. It’s such a dramatic story about the risks of tying your entire identity to someone else. She recently said in a video, “I am myself. One of my life principles is not to live to please others.” [7, 13] It’s a powerful message after such an intense journey!
