During her final years of high school, Chinese teenager Xu Yunting found an unusual way to make some pocket money — transforming herself into male video game characters and taking their female devotees on dates.
The trend, called "cos commissioning," has gained traction in China recently, with social media posts garnering millions of views as an increasing number of young women use their purchasing power to engineer a meeting with their dream man in real life.
One early morning in Shanghai last month, Xu carefully inserted contacts to enlarge her irises and adjusted a tangerine wig to transform into Jesse, a character from the romance quest mobile game Light and Night.
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