People spend an average of almost 4 hours a day improving their beauty, according to a study of almost 100,000 people. people from 93 countries. Among the groups that spend less time on it are men, middle-aged people, people in long-term relationships, people who avoid social media and those who consider themselves moderately attractive.
“Taking care of your beauty is a practice that is widespread all over the world, in every culture and demographic. As much as 99 percent of respondents declared that they spend at least 10 minutes a day taking care of their beauty. And the world average was 238 minutes a day among women and 215 minutes among men” – sums up in an interview with PAP Dr. Marta Kowal from the University of Wrocław, who is the first author of the international publication in “Evolution and Human Behavior” (https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S1090513822000472).
Respondents from all over the world – approx. 93 thousand. adults from 93 countries – were asked to assess how much time they spend a day on the activities indicated in the survey, the main purpose of which is – broadly speaking – improving their own beauty. “If someone decided that they were doing a given activity primarily for health or relaxation, it was not counted as taking care of their beauty” – emphasizes Marta Kowal.
Among the biggest beautifying time-wasters were: physical activity (and thus improving the silhouette), taking care of diet (including preparing special meals), hygiene (including, for example, visits to the dentist), dressing (including buying clothes and choosing clothes every day) , taking care of hair (and facial hair), applying cosmetics and make-up.
In Poland, it took a lot of time to take care of the diet. Here we exceeded the world average. When it comes to exercise, we underestimated the statistics. “The biggest difference between Poles and the rest of the world among all types of behavior occurred in taking care of clothes. We spent much less time choosing outfits than the average in the world,” says Marta Kowal.
“It might seem that among the most beauty-conscious countries there will be highly developed ones, such as the USA or France. And it is not. There, compared to other countries, the time spent on beautification was relatively short” – sums up Dr. Marta Kowal.
And he mentions that the record average daily time of taking care of one’s appearance (sometimes even 6-8 hours) was recorded in: Tunisia, Thailand, Ghana, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Colombia and Ecuador. Usually in Africa and Central America more time was spent on making the appearance more attractive than in Europe and North America.
“Poland ranked more or less in the middle, although it was at the forefront of Europe (before us by Ukraine, Italy and Romania)” – lists the psychologist from the University of Wrocław.
Researchers looked for demographic, cultural and social factors that relate to some people taking better care of their beauty than others.
Gender is such an obvious relationship. It turned out that women around the world spend an average of 20 minutes more on beauty than men.
In the case of Poland, this difference was 40 minutes. In Poland, women declared that they spend 238 minutes a day on beauty-related activities (the same as the world average), and men 196 minutes (below the world average). “In terms of gender differences, we were high in this comparison” – the researcher comments.
“To put it simply, the evolutionary explanation assumes that we care about our attractiveness in order to get mates and pass on our genes. Women taking care of their beauty could gain more than men. On the other hand, men who preferred attractive women were more likely to choose young partners, i.e. in reproductive age, healthy and fertile; therefore, they probably had more offspring than men for whom physical attractiveness was not a priority,” explains Dr. Kowal.
In the case of women, paying attention to the physical attractiveness of a partner may not have had such an evolutionarily fixed significance. “It is presumed that women prioritized signs of high status, prestige and material resources rather than men,” the study reads.
Another explanation assumes that cultural trends – transmitted even by the media – try to squeeze us into one canon of beauty. “It is assumed that there is more pressure on women here, where the ideal of beauty is so high that it becomes virtually impossible for most women to achieve. But still, women often try to follow this pattern” – the researcher comments.
Age is another demographic factor that differentiates us in terms of the amount of time we spend beautifying ourselves.
And so, young people aged 18-25 usually devote the most time to taking care of their beauty. Then, the time of taking care of one’s beauty is gradually shortened, reaching the minimum age of 42 for women and 60 for men. After that, the time for beautification increases. Interestingly, among people aged around 35-37, men spend more time on their appearance than women (which is the only exception here).
Marta Kowal comments that beautification is so popular among young people, because, according to the evolutionary theory, they can only look for partners. In the next decades of life, when a lot of time is consumed by work, you often already have a partner and children have appeared – so there is not so much time to take care of your beauty. However, the opportunity to devote more time to beautification returns in the following decades. Then, comments the psychologist, children are often grown up, there is less work and more and more free time. Another thing is how time affects the body. With age, the appearance deviates more and more from the usual canons of beauty. So if you want to look attractive, people often spend more and more time on it.
Relationship status is also important. It might seem that singles spend the most time striving for a beautiful appearance. Meanwhile, research has shown that people who are dating, and therefore are in the early stages of forming relationships, spend significantly more time on this. The time taken to take care of beauty decreases in married people and in a stable relationship.
The researchers also looked for factors that would best predict how much time someone would spend on their appearance.
And the strongest correlation was the amount of time spent on social media. The more someone sat on e.g. Instagram, Tinder, Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, the more likely they were to spend a lot of time in beauty classes as well.
“It may be tempting to conclude from this that the more we interact with social media content, the more we pay attention to whether someone is attractive and the more we care about our beauty. But we must remember that the reverse relationship may well be true: it is the people who pay the most attention to their beauty who feel a greater need to spend more time on social media. Our research does not determine which explanation is closer to the truth” – comments Marta Kowal.
It was also studied how the perception of one’s beauty affects the time spent on improving it. It turned out that people who perceived themselves as extremely attractive – devoted the most time to becoming even more beautiful. People who considered themselves to be very unattractive also spent a lot of time taking care of their attractiveness. People who placed themselves in the middle of the beauty scale spent the least time on their appearance.
Another very important factor was how the roles of women and men are perceived in a given society. In countries where women’s roles were perceived in a traditional way, residents devoted more time to beauty activities than in countries where this approach was not common. “Interestingly – it concerned both the time women and men devoted to beauty” – adds Dr. Kowal. This result could partly explain why Americans and French citizens spend less time on their appearance than Central Americans.
“While there is a cultural notion that people should not be judged by their appearance, it turns out that we spend a lot of time every day getting other people to judge our appearance well. It is worth considering how much time we devote to becoming more beautiful. And is it really the amount of time we want to spend on it” – sums up Marta Kowal.
The research was carried out as part of the Preludium grant (https://projekty.ncn.gov.pl/en/index.php?projekt_id=444635) of the National Science Center. (PAP)
Author: Ludwika Tomala