“My husband just got his hair trimmed from the local parlour for a 120 bucks and the same parlour charges 250 from me for a trim!”
“Yaar, I need to save up an extra 1000 bucks just for waxing.”
We’ve heard all these lines somewhere or the other, haven’t we? However, not a lot of us give much importance as to why this pricing difference exists. Most of us are aware that girls have to spend extra on beauty treatments, personal care and clothing. However, most of us take it as a cold truth and financial fact set in stone by the industry.
Did you know that women generally have to pay more for buying personal products, be it clothing, cosmetics or even personal hygiene products? And maybe, as a woman, you’ve come across this pricing difference but never found the correct term for it. Well, it is called pink tax and in spite of the already existing and ever-widening wage gap, it does exist.
Products which the market claims are especially designed for women cost, on average, 7% more than products clubbed under the products for men, according to a New York City Department of Consumer Affairs study. This difference can be seen in apparel, toys, and healthcare products, among other products.
Moreover, the billboards and advertisements we see are mostly aimed at women, telling them that there’s something wrong with their bodies and personality unless they work on it. Be it moisturisers, expensive hair treatments, fancy clothes, or even razors used for body hair removal, women are constantly told they need to spend on these very products to be ‘better’.
There’s a very great meme we’re sharing here:
One might laugh it off but the truth is that it is exactly this pricing difference along with the social conditioning that makes women spend more. While women are told to buy a bunch of stuff for their hair, face, teeth, toes, nails, eyelashes and elbows, men have fewer products available. Even worse than this are products which are of the same use but are marketed in a way where it becomes gender-sensitive. For example, razors are meant to remove body hair and be it for men or women, it essentially has the same function. However, we went to a local chemist shop and found that the cheapest razor available for men came at INR 19 while a razor for women started from INR 55.