Women only use quarter of £450 beauty collection

 

The average British woman has a beauty collection worth £450 but only uses a quarter, or £110 worth, of it, according to new research.

The average woman's crop of make-up, skincare and fragrances is worth £450 at any one time but most of that is left to linger in bathroom cabinets or at the bottom of make-up bags with only £110 worth getting used.

The poll of 1,872 women by online beauty retailer Xtras also quizzed them about why they didn't use items they owned. The most popular answer (52%) was that they probably had products in their beauty collection that were past their use-by dates.

Meanwhile 41% admitted was that they regularly bought items they didn’t really need and 22% said they had been bought items by people as gifts that they would never use.

Women were also asked which was the most expensive item in their beauty collection (selecting more than one answer if needed). Perfume came out top with 37%, followed by foundation (29%), mascara (21%), moisturiser (16%) and blusher (13%). 

Xtras spokesperson Steven Berke said: “Many women are clearly buying items on impulse that they don’t really need when it comes to beauty products. To see how many hundreds of pounds worth of cosmetics are currently being wasted was shocking."