Beauty care is way to a woman's heart - includes related articleson beauty departments, make-up, lip cosmetics, eye make-up, nailcosmetics chains

by Elizabeth Parks

The American female is a very desirable customer. As the personusually in charge of most household purchases, this is theconsumer that most mass market stores target as their primarycustomer.

For four years now, Drug Store News has sponsored a nationalsample of bauty care use and shopping patterns among Americanwomen. The study is conducted for us by the Princeton, N.J.-basedGallup Organization.

This year's survey, which is based on a national projectablesample of 500 women, confirms that beauty care categories reallyare a popular way to a woman's heart.

Merchandised and advertised strategically, beauty care categorieslike fragrances, lipsticks and mascaras can lure a woman into astore, and once there, of course, she can be tempted intobrowsing and buying other types of merchandise.

This year Gallup found that, based on their incidence and frequency of use, there are three color cosmetics categories that especially deserve to be highlighted, via merchandising andadvertising, in the cosmetics departments of all chain drugstores. These are face, lip and eye color cosmetics.

According to Gullup, eight our of every 10 American women over 18 use face color cosmetics (80 percent) and lip color (80 percent), while seven out of every 10 (69 percent) use some type of eyecolor product.

In comparison, nail color is currently only used by half theadult female population (51 percent), while nail treatmentproducts are only used by a quarter of the population (25percent), according to Gallup.

Not only do the face, lip and eye cosmetics segments have thehighest population of users, they are also the segments with thehighest incidence of use, Gallup discovered.

Eight of all 10 users apply either a face, lip or eye makeup atleast once a day.

However, only one-third (35 percent) of all nail color users saidthey use a color polish "all the time," while 58 percent saidthey use polish "all or most of the time."

Possibly because very few women are ever entirely satisfied withthe skin tones they inherit, 65 percent of all women use either aliquid base foundation, and/or a face powder with a blush.