“When I was watching my wife paint the finger and toenails of my 3 girls this past Sunday (60 nails in all), I found myself thinking about just how much women must need to “invest” in simply doing all of the stuff that comes along with being a woman. Sure, any woman can choose not to do some of that stuff, like those nails, and many do, but most do not. Most women in the world, from their first steps, are faced with a massive list of things that they “need” and “need to do” for most of the rest of their lives that the majority of men don’t have to worry about.

Take those nails, for instance. A tiny bottle of nail polish runs, say, $8, and can let a women do her nails maybe 20 or 30 times. But you need a dozen colors of polish, and some get misplaced or given to friends to borrow, or your kids dump them out on the carpet or use them to paint a school project. So call that $100/year on polish at home. And you need all of the other accoutrements for doing at-home nails, like nail polish remover and Q-tips. And those foam toe-separator things. But most women probably also get professional manicures and pedicures done, at least once a season, which is easily another $100 a year. $200/year for, what, 60 years?

$12,000 in a lifetime for nails, and that’s on the low end.

This article in People concludes that women spend about $15,000 on makeup over the course of their lives.

I was also a little shocked when I saw that a study conducted by Groupon found that women and up spending roughly $225,000 over a lifetime on their appearance, versus men’s $175,000:

I discovered a term in my research that I think I heard before, but forgot about. It’s the “pink tax”: Extra money companies charge women for items that both men and women use in some form or another.”