Eating Lipstick

Reports are in from all over: women (and, one assumes in Goth subculture, certain men) eat 10 pounds of lipstick a year! Or maybe you heard five pounds? Six pounds?

The fact that the number is different every time one hears this well-traveled story points instantly to something about the statistic being fishy.

There's, firstly, the matter that a tube of lipstick isn't very large - Kat Von D comes in a 0.11 oz tube, for example. To eat even one pound of it in a year, you'd first need to buy more than 145 tubes of it in a 12 month span. Then you would have to use them all up -- and in ways that only involve eating it. No blotting your lipstick on paper or letting it come off on your cup, or washing it off at the end of the night. This works out to finishing a whole tube of lipstick in three days or less. Even Goth kids don't go through it so fast. (And this is just for one pound of lipstick -- if you were eating ten pounds of lipstick a year, you'd need to chow down on four tubes a day.)

BeautyGeeks has a more in depth article on the subject, as does Snopes.