Women Waste Thousands Over A Lifetime On Expensive Perfumes

Admittedly women like to shop, who doesn’t? We’ve been stereotypically branded as shoe and handbag obsessed, but according to market research women spend about $7 billion a year on makeup, and other beauty related products.

In the US alone, 68 percent of women dole out their dollars on beauty products – purchasing two or three times more blush, lipstick and gloss, foundation, concealer, eyeliner, mascara, and eye shadow than they’ll ever need or use. A makeup bag can easily contain a few hundred dollars in the abovementioned enhancements along with brushes to apply them – much of which will expire long before it’s ever used.

Beauty isle real-estate is cutthroat. Often an over-buy can be stimulated by concern a particular product will be in limited supply or discontinued. We also like to impulsively experiment with products, but ultimately we stick to a few tried-and-true favorites – whether it’s a $2 mascara or a $25 eyeliner.

Still the spending and waste can be astronomical as many of the items contain a similar mix of ingredients but are radically priced across a wide spectrum.

A UK market survey sampled 2,100 women, 18 and over, and found many of them spend thousands frivolously over a lifetime – an average of £3,600 (about $5,500 US) – on overpriced fragrances they’ll likely never wear.

Eight percent of respondents admitted they owned upwards of 10 or more unused bottles of the pricey scents. But in the end, used or not, what are they really paying for?

When you purchase a bottle of perfume around the price-point of $100 how much of that is for the contents of the bottle you actually spritz yourself with – some more heavy handed than others? Brace yourself – about $2. The actual liquid concentrate – which includes a mixture of distilled water, alcohol, fragrant oils, and chemical compounds – is the least valuable part of the designer perfume. While the mixture of exotic fragrance creating additives can be expensive, it’s typically introduced in very small concentrations.

The remaining $98, broken down, covers the cost of the bottle and packaging, marketing, licensing, and other random fees – including calculating the manufacturer’s profit and potential overhead. Therefore, for your money’s worth, for those of you who are budget minded, you may want to consider asking for a sample size.

Otherwise you’ll be like the 60 percent of the women polled who unabashedly admitted to re-gifting their unopened perfumes to loved ones instead of allowing them to languish in their bathroom, on a dresser top, or boxed away in a linen closet.

How much do you think you spend a year on makeup and other related merchandise? How much of that do you think goes more towards the marketing than the quality of ingredients?

[Image via Shutterstock]