The average British woman loses more than 24 days of sleep per year to accommodate a beauty routine, new research has found. Most notably, much of that time is spent attempting to appear ‘more awake’.
According to Cosmetify, the average woman spends 40 minutes on a beauty routine in the morning and 25 minutes at night, losing five hours and 25 minutes of sleep each week to accommodate their routine. Over the course of the year, this amounts to 24 days and 11 hours of sleep lost in getting up earlier and going to bed later.
Ironically, more than two thirds of the women feel they don’t get enough sleep, and 53% take measures to appear more awake, using concealer and other brightening products. The study, which surveyed more than 2,300 British women over the age of 18, also found that 71% of women wear make-up the ‘majority of the time’ with over half applying it every morning.
While the figures around how many women wear make-up daily aren’t exactly surprising, the idea that we’re losing almost an entire night's worth of sleep each week just to whack it on is quite bewildering – especially when you consider how many of us do it to appear less tired.
It just goes to show that not only are beauty standards forcing us to spend our hard-earned money – and clearly a lot of time – they’re also impacting our health, given that continued lack of sleep affects your general overall health. In fact, according to the NHS, lack of sleep can make you prone to serious medical conditions like obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure.
Of course, this isn’t just about applying make-up: the beauty routines also include skincare regimes as the study found 69% of women have a regular skin routine in the morning.
‘When you actually calculate the time and break down the figures, the stats are astonishing,’ Isa Lavahun, Digital Brand Manager at www.cosmetify.com said in a statement. ‘24 days a year is a lot of time so it’s worth keeping in mind that although we all need our beauty routines, getting enough sleep will help reduce a lot of the problems (dark circles, heavy eyelids and spots). Though we all have our beauty and skincare rituals, it’s crucially important to add plenty of water and a good night’s sleep to the daily regime.’
What else is also crucially important? Dismantling the idea that you have to make yourself up every day just to feel beautiful or valued. While wearing make-up is a personal choice, there are incessant pressures on women to always appear perfect. After all, it was only last month that Clarissa Farr – former headmistress of St Paul’s Girls School – was in hot water for pointing out that beautiful women are more likely to get ahead in their careers.
You might love doing make-up, you might be a skincare obsessive or you might be one of the many who feels a pressure to apply it.
Perhaps there’s an alternative – maybe instead of waking up early to put make-up on, we should be setting that alarm 35 minutes later and doing five minutes of positive affirmations instead. It just might give us enough radiance to feel beautiful without make-up after all.
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