The health and beauty industry is a rapidly expanding sector in the United Kingdom, and across the globe too!
As an award winning supplier of salon and spa uniforms throughout the country, we at Simon Jersey have seen first-hand just how quickly the industry has grown, and how varied and unique each and every business in the sector is.
To get a better picture of the UK’s health and beauty industry, we decided to take data from an official census of the industry by HABIA, the Hair and Beauty Industry Authority, and combine it with interesting facts, figures, and world records to create an infographic that we think people both inside and outside of the world of hair and beauty will find interesting.
At the last census (circa 2012), the estimated annual turnover for the health and beauty industry in the UK was £6.2 billion, and the number of people employed in the trade was almost two hundred and fifty thousand; which, when you consider that 93.5% of the businesses had 10 or fewer employees, means that we are talking about a lot of shops, spas, and salons.
Health and Beauty employment hotspots were the North West and South East of England, which accounted for 13.5% and 14.4% of the nation’s beauty workforce respectively. No doubt boosted by the recent rise in media attention of the “Essex Spray Tan” and the “Scouse Brow”
90% of those in employment in the industry were made up by female workers. The percentages of the staff was fairly close across the age ranges of: 16-24 (30.4%), 25-34 (22.6%), and 35-44 (29.1%). However, only 15.5% of the UK’s beauty workforce were between 45 and 59 years old, and a mere 2.4% were over sixty years old. Showing the industry’s meteoric rise in recent years, but perhaps also suggesting that people in the industry are more likely to end up owning their own business, and as a result are in a better position to retire at a younger age than workers in other sectors.
When it comes to the money that the Great British public spend on their looks, men spend on average £75,030 during their lifetime, whereas women will spend an incredible £133,575 – including £18,000 on make-up and skincare alone! Women will also spend a year and three months of their lives applying their make-up, although it will feel much longer to their partners waiting downstairs.
The average human grows 590 miles of hair in their lifetime, so it’s no wonder that we will have on average 480 haircuts. Perhaps we should all start saving our discarded curls though, as a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair once sold at auction for $15,000! The Guinness Book of Records lists Xie Qiuping of China as having the longest hair in the world, measuring in at an incredible 18ft 5.54 inches long! The longest fingernails on a pair of male hands belonged to Melvin Boothe of the USA, whose nails were a combined length of 32ft 3.8 inches
Men will spend on average five months of their lives shaving, and given that it is estimated that if they did not cut or trim their beard it would grow to over 30 feet in their lifetime, this is understandable! We couldn’t find any data on how many months their wives or girlfriends would spend “borrowing” their razor to remove their unwanted body hair, but we did manage to find out that this practice dates back to the ancient Egyptians (the removal of body hair, not stealing of razors).
We hope that you have enjoyed our facts, figures and trivia on the health and beauty industry. If you would like to share the infographic on your own website, please feel free to use the embed code below; simply copy and paste it into your website’s publishing platform, and away you go! We would also appreciate if you would be so kind as to credit us as the infographic source when you do so.
<p><strong>Please include attribution to SimonJersey.com with this graphic.</strong><br /><br />
<img src=”https://www.simonjersey.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Beauty-Infographic.jpg” alt=”Health & Beauty Industry Infographic | Simon Jersey” width=”700″ border=”0″/></a></p>
Simon Jersey would like to thank the following sources for the information used in this infographic:
habia.org
guinnessworldrecords.com
dailymail.co.uk
holleewoodhair.com
