Bogus skincare surveys
As a bit of light relief from Covid, let’s look at this story at Stuff. It’s mostly about maternity wear (correctly disparaging the maternal-industrial complex), but there’s this
There’s having a face. Yes, you should be ashamed of your natural face. Luckily, there’s all manner of products to correct it, and makeup to cover it up. You’ll need both, to adequately conceal that shameful natural face of yours. It’ll cost the average woman about $400,000 over her lifetime.
If that were true, it would leave avocado toast in the dust. Where does this figure come from?
The story doesn’t say, but there’s a similar figure that’s quite popular, eg at Buzzfeed,
A new survey from Skin Store of more than 3,000 women found that the average woman in the US spends around $300,000 on makeup in her lifetime.
The increase from $300k to $400k looks like it could easily be a currency conversion. Buzzfeed (of course) doesn’t link to information about the actual survey, but it is available.
The first thing to notice is
When you take into consideration how much the daily face costs of our New York women, they can spend up to $300,000 per lifetime on skincare products and cosmetics.
So the figure has been misquoted in translation, moving from New York women to US women to NZ women. It’s probably not true even there — Skin Store don’t give any information about methodology.
We can see how badly off the number must be with a bit of simple arithmetic and a few Google queries. Skin Store says they surveyed women aged 16 to 75. There are about 100 million women aged 18 and over in the US. That’s not quite the right age range, but it will do as an approximation. Multiplying by US$300k per lifetime gives US$30 thousand billion. Dividing by the 60-year ‘make-up lifetime’ gives half a trillion per year. Total US GDP is about $20 trillion. The claim is that more than 2% of total US GDP goes on face-care products. For comparison, the US spends about 0.75 trillion on primary and secondary education, 1.7 trillion on all food.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, who actually care about getting this sort of thing roughly right, estimate an average annual expenditure of less than US$800 per ‘consumer unit’ on all ‘Personal care products and services’. A ‘consumer unit’ is roughly what normal people would call a household or family, and $800/year (which includes a lot more than just makeup, and not just women) comes to $48,000 per 60 years. The Skin Store number looks to be off by around a factor of ten. Just making things up would be more accurate than that.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The important shift is probably from “up to $300,000” per lifetime in the most upstream source quoted, to “average”. The first might well be a single outlier in the survey; if there’s a free text question ‘how much you spent on makeup in the past year’ it’s easy to imagine someone saying “$5,000”, and whether or not it’s correct for that individual (not impossible it happens occasionally) it doesn’t make it the “average woman” (or of course, doesn’t mean the last 12 months was an average year).
4 years ago
Good point. Or they might have asked about the past week, and someone just happened to buy all the things that week.
4 years ago