A new Chinese social media craze is seeing people painting human figures on their faces and making them dance to the music by grimacing.

The quirky competition emerged on video sharing app Mei Pai, encourages participants to film the moments of their winking, squirting and pouting before uploading the clips for public voting.

Footage shared by People's Daily on YouTube shows a number of contestants pulling of their best moves to their favourite songs.

Quirky trend: A new craze has emerged which sees people grimacing as much as possible in order to make their face painting dance to music

Top hit: A clip, uploaded by user 'qi tao lang a' on December 11, had 70,000 likes and is one of the most popular acts. Pictured is a screen shot from the video

The competition is believed to start last week by Mei Pai, a highly popular video-sharing app and website with more than 140 million users.

On the topic page on Mei Pai's website, the organiser wrote: 'Pick a favourite song of yours, and tag your video under the #human face dance competition# hashtag in Chinese. Let's all take the video, perhaps you will become a hit!'

Most participating videos are between 10 and 20 seconds long.

In one of the earliest footage shown under the thread on Mei Pai's website, which had the uploading date of December 12, a woman tried to make the scribble above her mouth move by pouting.

Another video, uploaded even earlier on December 11 by user 'qi tao lang a', sees a female participant trying to grimace to the beat of popular Mandarin title 'High Song'.

The 11-second-long footage one of the highest rated clips in the competition so far, with 70,000 likes and 4,306 comments.

Boy band power! Three men, who painted cartoon character Crayon Shin-chan on their faces, tried to make the figure do his iconic buttock-wiggling dance

As creative as possible: Participants are asked to pick their favourite songs and film themselves grimacing

The video, posted by People's Daily on December 16, is a collage of nine participants' performances.

In it, one of the contestants painted a young girl wearing a crop top on her face. The painted figure's spread arms happened to cover the contestant's eyebrows.

So when she squinted, the figure would appear to move her arms and shoulders, giving the impression of dancing.

This seems to be a common strategy among female contestants.

There are also group acts.

Three men formed a group and painted on their faces the images of Crayon Shin-chan, a popular Japanese cartoon character who is known for his buttock-wiggling dance.

To represent Crayon Shin-chan's iconic choreography, the trio winked and popped their eyes in turn while moving around their mouths.

Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, has also caught up the trend by creating a trending topic of #human face dance competition#.

The thread has so far had 610,000 clicks.

Show your moves: It's a common strategy to paint the figures' arms over the eyebrows to make them dance

Let's groove to the music! The contest was launched by Mei Pai, a popular video-sharing app and website

The face-dancing competition is the newest challenge in a long line of quirky trends on the Chinese internet.

Other social media tests have included seeing how many coins women can hold with their collarbones and how many people women can spread their legs across.

In June, the Chinese social media witnessed one of its biggest challenges: the belly button challenge.