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January 2013

Products men are too ashamed to buy at the store


There are some things no self-respecting man will do in public. Buying skin creams is apparently one of them.

Though more men are using a growing array of beauty products, experts say they tend to do such shopping online rather than suffer the embarrassment of paying for a tube of eye gel at the store.

Men make up around 20% of online shoppers on BeautyCollection.com, says Shawn Tavakoli, yet account for only 5% of the clientele at his California shops.

“Men buy beauty products to make them look sexier and cover up imperfections— they just don’t want people to know about it,” says Cherie Corso, founder of beauty company G2Organics in New York, which sells products online and in select stores.

Men also seem to more likely to buy these items on a whim, according to Mintel, a consumer research firm. Some 37% of men make impulse purchases when shopping for beauty products online, versus just 26% of women, the company found in a new survey.

Some men find it “a bit embarrassing” to buy hair-thinning-treatment products like Rogaine in a department store, says Shannon Romanowski, beauty and personal care analyst at Mintel.

Among the most popular items for his male clientele, Tavakoli says, are Clarisonic facial cleansers — brushes designed to remove dead skin, clear pores and help prevent blackheads. Men buy hair dye, eye gels, exfoliating creams and even makeup online, she says. G2Organic’s Hickey Stick for men, makeup packaged in a cigar tube, is one of her biggest sellers.

“It’s selling like crazy,” Corso says. “Men love it.” For something like sunblock or shaving cream, she says, they’re more willing to go to a drugstore.

Beauty products are not the only items shoppers feel more comfortable purchasing online than in the store. When it was first released in the U.S. last year, the digital version of the erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” sold six times faster than the print edition. And one in three romantic and erotic books sold in 2011 were e-books, according to the Romance Writers of America, versus one in five books overall.

Self-conscious men appear to feel the same way about beauty products as some people feel about steamy novels. “Even for younger guys, there’s still a bit of a stigma around purchasing beauty products,” says Kit Yarrow, professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

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