How much time or money do women spend researching or test driving skincare and/ or beauty products in a month or a year?

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How much time or money do women spend researching or test driving skincare and/ or beauty products in a month or a year?

Hello! Thanks for using Wonder to ask about the amount of time and money women spend researching or test driving skincare and beauty products! The resources we found most useful for this request were Brand Watch and Digi Day. In short, women spend an average of 2.3 hours per month viewing YouTube content, the majority of which is related to beauty and skincare topics, while women who purchase beauty sample boxes are generally spending about $10 per month on these box-subscription services. You will find a deep dive of our findings below!

METHODOLOGY In searching for an answer to your question, we consulted academic databases, corporate websites, industry reports, and trusted media sites. After searching exhaustively, we were not able to find any statistics which directly address your question in terms of total, overall averages. However, we did find some valuable and relative information from which we were able to triangulate and estimate some ballpark figures. While Wonder generally aims to only include sources which are recent to the past two years, we did include a couple of sources in our research which are slightly older (2012). This is because more recent information providing these statistics was lacking or not publicly available. FINDINGS The average woman watches YouTube about 35 minutes per week, with the top two categories most watched by women on YouTube being make-up and cosmetics with 89.31% of female YouTube viewership, and skin and nail care with 85.29%. Additionally, the research we found suggests that YouTube, and other social media, are primary ways in which "women discover and engage with beauty brands."
Since we know that women are spending the majority of their YouTube visits viewing beauty and skincare related content (which we assume includes learning about new products, reading comments posted by other users, listening to reviews and watching product demonstrations), and we know that the average woman spends about 35 minutes per week on Youtube, we calculated that women spend an average of 2.3 hours per month viewing YouTube content, the majority of which is related to beauty and skincare topics. (Caluclation: 35 minutes per week x 4 weeks per month = 140 minutes or 2.3 hours per month)
To give an idea of how many women are engaging in this type of research: 37% of women surveyed in a small sample student-conducted study said they read beauty how-to articles or watch make-up tutorials to learn new information less than once a month, while 28.3% said they never do. Additionally, "59.8% of respondents read Cosmopolitan magazine on a regular basis."
Next, in regards to testing products, many women currently rely on box-service subscriptions which provide product samples usually on a monthly basis. While we were not able to access any direct statistics which show the total monthly spend by women within this industry, we were able to uncover some interesting case studies which shed some light into how much money women are spending samples and test products. We will dive deeper into these case studies now:
Birchbox has over 1 million subscribers and a subscription costs $10 per month.
Ipsy has 1.5 million subscribers also with a $10 per month subscription cost.
Aveda, Bare Escentuals, ELF, and Ulta also offer beauty boxes, however these particular services are non-subcription. The average cost per order for one of these boxes ranges between $30 and $65 dollars, with up to 19% of customers making more than three purchases.
Based on this information we can see that women who purchase these sample boxes are generally spending about $10 per month, while sometimes spending as much as $65, however the latter appears to be more of a splurge as the majority of customers spending this amount are not doing so regularly. These findings are further supported by data which reveals the amount of money women reportedly spend on beauty products each month: According to a survey which compared the beauty habits of men and women, 6% of female respondents said they "spend more than $100 month" on beauty products, and about 50% said they "spend less than $25 per month."
Furthermore, a recent statistic out of the UK states: The average person "spends around 1 hour and 40 minutes browsing" social media sites every day. In accordance with this information, women are posting more content than men at a rate of "55% more posts," and "40 million more women visit twitter than men each month. Among top 50 brands’ followers on Instagram, 53% are women, and makeup brand MAC has 82% women followers." These statistics are interesting to keep in mind as we consider the next part of this research. We looked at data from a hashtag tracking website to see how many times beauty and skincare related hashtags were being used. Here is what the data reveals:
#skincare used 13.57M times.
#skincareproducts used 90.17K times.
#skincareproduct used 33.93K times.
#beauty used 154.5M times.
#beautyblog used 2.056M times.
#beautyproduct used 354.0K times.
#beautyproducts used 839.3K times. While it is not clear how many of these hashtags are being used by men and how many are being used by women, it is a fair assumption to make that the majority of them are coming from women, if we consider collectively the research we have gathered for this response. This in turn can provide a little insight into how many women are discussing beauty and skincare topics and products during the average 1 hour and 40 minute time-frame they spend on social media every day.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Here is some additional information we came across in our research, which we thought you might find interesting as it relates somewhat to your question. "14% of women spend less than 5 minutes getting ready, 13% spend an hour, and more than 50% of the respondents say that they spend less than 30 minutes per day getting ready" "A recent survey conducted by the Today show in conjunction with AOL revealed that, on average, women spend approximately 55 minutes per day on hair and makeup. A little number crunching reveals the staggering fact that 55 minutes of daily beauty prep equates to approximately 335 hours — or two full weeks — of self-pampering per year."
"78 percent of women spend an hour a day on their appearance." A "survey asked more than 2,000 adults and 200 teenagers over the age of 16 how much attention they dedicate to their appearance, and its effect on their daily lives." The survey results were as follows: "Time spent on appearance: Teen girls: 7.7 hours per week Adult women: 6.4 hours per week" This survey also suggested that "adult women worry more regularly about their appearance (67 percent at least once a week.)" Additionally, "80 percent of teen girls complained about their appearance to someone at least once in the past month." "Anti-aging skincare continues to gain popularity amongst young and mature consumers alike. 40% of Millennials are taking an active approach to staying young by using anti-aging products, while older consumers are looking to reinvent themselves. Having an 'ageless' image and attitude is important to both generations, which is reflected in $679 billion product sales." "Online beauty retail sales were estimated to have hit $301 billion in 2014, and are forecast to increase 17% by 2019."

CONCLUSION To wrap it up, women spend an average of 2.3 hours per month viewing YouTube content, the majority of which is related to beauty and skincare topics, while women who purchase beauty sample boxes are generally spending about $10 per month on these box-subscription services. Thanks for using Wonder! Please let us know if we can help with anything else!

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