themselves to standards of beauty that society shows to them. The effect of cosmetic advertising on consumers is a relatively new area of research, but it requires attention seeing as it is a large and growing industry; as previously stated, the YMCA reported that nearly $7 billion dollars was spent on cosmetics in 2008 alone. It is believed by Thomas Cash that “a girl’s initial experimentation with cosmetics in early adolescent can be seen as a rite of passage as well as growth towards developing a feminine identity” (as cited in Scott, n.d.). Seeing as cosmetics have become such an integral part of women’s lives, it is becoming more and more important to understand the effect that the industry is having on women today. In order to gain an initial understanding of how the industry is affecting women today, this study will attempt to gather general information about college THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY’S INFLUENCE ON WOMEN 12 women and their use of cosmetics. The study will attempt to report descriptive statistics about how and when college women wear makeup, their loyalty to certain types of makeup and makeup brands, their awareness of makeup trends and effects, as well as some general personality variables. Method A 45 question survey was developed that asked a large variety of questions about cosmetic usage, behavior, and personal habits. Two individual difference measures were also used. Self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) was measure using an 18-item scale (Snyder and Gangestad, 1986) and Self-Esteem was measured using the Texas Social Behavior Inventory – Form A (Helmreich & Stapp, 1974). The survey was administered using Qualtrics online software. Responses were gathered from 137 college students through requests on social media sites. The majority of survey responses were driven through Facebook, but Twitter, LinkedIn, and emails were also used. This sampling technique can be referred to as “snowball sampling”, which means that the initial group of those sampled would refer this survey to other students. Snowball sampling was chosen because the “major advantage is that it substantially increases the likelihood of locating the desired characteristic in the population. It also results in relatively low sampling variance and costs” (Malhotra, 2012, p. 345). This method was decided to be the best method for this research because it allowed students to invite their friends to take the survey. However, one potential weakness of this method is that it does eliminate respondents that are in no way connected to the initial group of respondents. Even so, this method was the most logical for this study. THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY’S INFLUENCE ON WOMEN 13 The survey returned 137 responses (113 female and 24 male). Since the research study was only interested in female respondents, the male responses were removed from the data set prior to analysis. A review of the data also revealed that 16 participants did not complete the survey and 5 participants did not follow instructions. These responses were also removed prior to analysis. The final data set consisted of 92 participants. Results The data was analyzed to provide general descriptive findings and regressions were run to investigate the effects of self-monitoring and self-esteem on participants’ responses. Descriptive Statistics • All respondents are between the ages of 18 and 23 • Most respondents are from the New England area and are currently the University of New Hampshire • The majority of respondents, 66.3%, began wearing makeup when they were between 12- 15 years old. 18.5% began wearing makeup from the ages of 16-18. Out of 92 responses, there were only 3 respondents who do not wear makeup at all, and all 89 who did all began wearing makeup below the age of 18. • When asked whether or not users understood how to use makeup to best flatter their own individual features, 58.7% of respondents chose “agree” while another 18.5% chose “strongly agree”. 12% of users neither agreed nor disagreed. Only two users answered, “strongly disagree” to this question. • When asked how important appearance is, how important makeup is to appearance, how important makeup is to self-confidence, how important makeup is to comfort in social THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY’S INFLUENCE ON WOMEN 14 situations, and how important makeup is in professional situations, most respondents answered that it was either “very important” or “somewhat important” to all situations. Further breakdown of these beliefs is shown in the following chart. Question Extremely Important Very Important Somewhat Important Neither Important nor Unimportant Somewhat Unimportant Very Unimportant Not at all Important How important do you think appearance is? 9 33 46 1 3 0 0 How