Phew! Soap firms clean up as we pour €140m down drain
Monday February 26 2007
The nation forked out just over €70m on soaps, shower and bath gels and deodorants.
And an almost identical figure - €68.8m - was spent on perfumes for both men and women.
Almost 18m bars of soap and just over 11m bottles of shower and bath gels went down the drain in 2006.
The market research company Datamonitor have just compiled the reports on Personal Hygiene in Ireland and Fragrances in Ireland, which reveal the amount the country spends on keeping clean.
The Irish population sprayed 12.3m bottles of deodorant on themselves in the last year.
And we are expected to be buying 600,000 more bottles by 2010.
Fragrances
Last year, 1.6m bottles of perfume for women were bought in this country.
This was along with one million bottles of men's cologne and 100,000 bottles of unisex fragrance.
Famous faces, from billionaire Donald Trump to former Wimbledon champ Maria Sharapova, along with Britney Spears and J-Lo, have all slapped their well-known names on a bottle of scent.
Even Paris Hilton has got in on the act and happily joined the dizzying array of celebrity-endorsed bottles of perfumes on the shop shelves.
Datamonitor forecast that the demand for fragrances is to remain virtually the same, with just 0.1pc of an increase in the amount of bottle sold by 2010.
The Irish population currently spend €41.9m on female fragrances, but the males spend about half that amount, with €25.3m paid for men's fragrances and just €2.2m on unisex bottles of scents.
While there is little increase in demand expected at the perfume counter, we are expected to be buying 800,000 more bars of soap by 2010, according to their new report.
Meanwhile, in another recent report by the same research company, Irish women were found to be one of the most extravagant spenders in Europe on cosmetics.
Cosmetics
It revealed that there was €55.7m spent on make-up by the nation in 2003.
The also report showed that teenagers and the twenty-somethings are the biggest spenders on cosmetics, along with women aged over 55.
Women between 35 and 54 spent the least amount on eye shadows, lipsticks and other cosmetics, according to the consumer research group.
- Lynn Kelleher
