Roundabout
Powder and Paint
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
ONCE every five years a team of researchers hired by the magazine Woman goes out and asks some thousands of British women what cosmetics they use. and the results of the most recent one appeared last week. The questions were actually asked at the beginning of last summer; the sample was stratified according to social class, age, area and town size; and tables for this breakdown are conscientiously set out at the back. An occupational control (unexplained) was also introduced, they say: there is no mention what the control was and how they worked that. Long charts are given on exactly who buys what cosmetic and where; so that one could work out, for instance, that those who don't like the idea of their wife wearing lipstick had better look out for a grey-headed widow of low financial status, over 45 and living in Scotland. A certain amount of bravery must have gone into getting the answers: for example, there was a check ques- tion for all those who said they had used a pro- duct in the previous week; the interviewer first said 'What day?' and then, when the woman said 'Thursday,' the interviewer—imagine saying this in the case of deodorants—would say, 'Oh, really—what week?' Especially as 61 per cent. of British women still don't use deodorants at all.
The most startling change in the make-up habits of British women in the last five years has been that five times as many of them now use eye-shadow, two and a half times as many use mascara. Whether this is because those who wear lipstick have cottoned on to the idea of balancing a face up and not just planting a red gash across the mouth and leaving it at that, or whether it is because more and more younger women think of the eyes first nowadays, the booklet does not, of course, reveal; motives are not part of this par- ticular survey. On the whole, the conclusions are encouraging for tfiose of us who believe that most north European, wintertime, over-21 faces need as much help as they can get; just about every sort of cosmetic is on the up-grade; only leaf shampoo (which is a poor idea, anyway) and, interestingly enough, home perms are falling off in popularity, though professional perms are do- ing better than ever.
There are some curious hiati, however, which make one wonder whether the prospect is really as encouraging as it sounds: 83 per cent, of women use lipstick, 54 per cent, some kind of foundation cream, but only 43 per cent, use either a cleansing cream or a cleansing milk to take it off. One would like to know (perhaps, like colour of hair, from 'investigator observation') how many consequently have spots. By the same token, 21 per cent. of the women had used nail var- nish within the last month, but only 19 per cent. had used remover. What has happened to the 2 per cent.? Have they chewed it off? Is it still there, peeling away? It is interesting, too, how tiny a proportion of those who paint their faces also paint their nails—though this certainly seems a good deal more sensible than the use of varnish, but no face-paint which is affected by those Finns, Germans and Frenchwomen who suppose, not always correctly, that they have a complexion which needs no improvement. Of course, what one really wants to know is how skilful people are becoming at making up so that they look the better for it, but that, too, is hardly the object of the survey.
Presumably its real objects are two. The first, as announced, is 'as a continuation of its [Witman's] service to all connected with the manufacture and marketing of cosmetics,' the rest of the service presumably being the unfailing regularity and politeness of the articles that re- commend the use of cosmetics. The other object, obviously, is to prove to advertisers that reading Woman makes women buy more cosmetics. And at first sight the figures seem to prove that they do. In almost all cases the Woman readers are a higher percentage of users than non-readers, a percentage difference varying from about I per cent. in the case of rouge, cuticle cream, astrin- gents and so on, to 10 per cent. for lipstick and mascara, 18 per cent. for deodorants; the aver- age difference is 4.6 per cent. However, there are one or two questions worth asking before these conclusions are accepted. Which comes first, Woman or the egg shampoo? Do people who read Woman buy cosmetics, or are people who are, in any case, buyers of cosmetics the same sort of people who are likely to read Woman?
And there are, more importantly, two impor- tant figures which aren't there—at least, not in the printed tables. Each type of cosmetic has
three tables: one describing the various brands Des and how often they are used, both by Woman
readers and by the rest; one describing the pre- ferred brands of those who use the stuff regularly, and the other correlating use with age, social class (as they call their financial distribution), area and
so forth. What is missing is any direct correlation between Woman readership and age. which is not, perhaps, as insignificant as it sounds. For consider. The older the women, the less paint they use, for, one supposes a variety of reasons; preju- dice survives, older women can remember times when a lipstick was a luxury, older women are more likely to have given up trying. One can deduce from the figures in the appendix, how- ever, that in the under-35 age group (the group of most likely cosmetic users, anyway) Woman readers are nearly 37 per cent. of the total sample interviewed; but in the over-35 group Woman readers are only 28 per cent. of the whole lot—a difference of nearly 9 per cent. I hope the point is clear: Woman readers are more likely to use cosmetics, and younger women are more likely to use cosmetics, but we are given no idea; of whether a woman of, say, 25 is really any more likely to use cosmetics if she reads Woman• It could, for all the survey tells us, be the other way round.
There is another point, too, for the sceptical. In order to avoid bias, the investigators did not ask 'Do you read Woman?' They asked: 'Wha do you read?' So there exists, in fact, the same set of figures for all the other magazines—or even newspapers: they could, if they wanted.* correlate the Top Paper with mascara, hand- cream with the Daily Telegraph. They could, if it comes to that, correlate other women's maga- ,1141blie zines and cosmetic consumption, and the figures (1%41nro might well be higher. It is clear why they didn't. 'I he when you think when the survey must have gonc Ziltelk I to press. It is only slightly a laughing matter to. seven realise that it does not matter now who sets mar( the propaganda—not now that all the powderg magazines are firing for the same big shot. 13tiri:I ' a
'Why isn't it wine-dark?'
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