The makeup tax: what the beauty norm actually costs women in money and time

Let's do the math that nobody wants to do.

Time first.

On average, women spend approximately 55 minutes per day on hair and makeup, which adds up to around 335 hours, or two full weeks, per year. Men spend an average of 22 minutes per day on their appearance. Over a lifetime, the gap is months.

Money next.

A CreditDonkey study estimated that the average woman spends about $15,000 on makeup in her lifetime. More broadly, the average American woman spends $877 annually on appearance, compared to $592 for men. Nearly one in ten Americans has gone into debt for appearance-related products and services, with the average debt amounting to $1,342.

. As the previous post on this sub showed, makeup directly conditions hiring and promotion prospects. Which means a significant portion of this cost is not optional or a choice, it's a professional tax.

This cost is not accidental. Feminist theorist Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination, 1990) described feminine beauty practices as a form of bodily discipline : invisible, unpaid work that women perform on themselves to conform to a male-defined standard of the presentable body. This work is never counted as work of course.

Arlie Hochschild, known for the concept of the second shift (the double day of paid work plus domestic labor), could just as easily have named a third shift: the presentation shift, the daily labor of preparing, maintaining, and correcting your face before entering the world.

The pink tax usually refers to the surcharge women pay on equivalent products. But makeup is a pink tax of a different order: not a surcharge on something men also buy, but an entire category of spending that barely exists for men, framed as a personal choice.

35% of women acknowledge that societal expectations influence their decision to wear makeup. 35% who admit it — in a cultural context where admitting it means conceding you don't do it "truly for yourself." The real number is almost certainly much higher.

(Reposting this one)

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