Here at Gee Hair, we understand just how important it can be to find that signature hairstyle that makes you feel fierce. And for most of us, hair is far easier to control than other aspects of our appearance like our weight or our skin. But even if we’re not changing our look, maintaining it can still take some effort, whether we’re making sure we have a salon perfect blowout or keeping our hair in place throughout a busy work day.
The global hair care industry is absolutely massive, reaching a value of £68.3 billion in 2020*. With so much money being spent on keeping our locks looking their best, how much time do we actually spend on our hair each day?
In order to find out, we ran a survey of 2,000 adults worldwide and asked how much time they spent each day on things like washing, drying and styling their hair, as well as touch ups throughout the day.
Our main findings were:
*This was worked out by converting the figures on the source from USD to GBP.
Even just maintaining our regular hairstyles and making sure we’re ready for the outside world can take time, whether we wake up early to fix every flyaway strand or just spend a minute or two running a brush through our manes a couple of times a day.
In October 2021, we used Censuswide to conduct a survey of 2,000 people to find out just how much of our days we dedicate to our luscious locks. We asked:
Thinking about your hair, how much time do you spend on the following in a typical day?
We asked our participants ‘please provide the average time you spend per day on each of the below tasks. If you do one or more of the below tasks less frequently than daily, we ask that you calculate an estimate of your daily time i.e. if you wash your hair every 3 days and this takes 30 mins then you would enter 6-10 mins.’
And provided them with the following answer options:
Here are our results:
Our survey found that:
It might be easily assumed that women spend more time on their hair than men, but we know there are plenty of guys out there who have glorious manes in need of daily maintenance. It’s certainly not a crime to want to look good!
The results of our survey found that:
Do we spend more time on our hair when we’re younger, with more energy and going out every weekend? Or are we more likely to be spending time on our appearance when we’re older and have more free time for such things?
The results of our survey found that:
We all have our favourites when it comes to the products and brands we use when looking after and maintaining our hair. But which brands are the most loved worldwide? We wanted to know. So we went on over to the Keyword Finder tool to discover which hair care brands are the most searched for online each month.
Hair Care Brand | Average Monthly Searches (Worldwide) |
Rituals | 1,890,000 |
Simple | 1,000,000 |
L’Oreal | 827,000 |
Dove | 560,000 |
The Ordinary | 559,000 |
Vichy | 550,000 |
Palmers | 500,000 |
Clarins | 466,000 |
Shea Moisture | 407,000 |
Schwartzkopf | 312,000 |
We found that:
On a smaller scale, we were curious about the brands loved most specifically by those of us in the UK and whether or not the results would be similar to our worldwide research. So we decided to use the trustyKeyword Finder tool to have a nosey about which hair care brands are most searched for each month in the UK.
Hair Care Brand | Average Monthly Searches (UK) |
The Ordinary | 259,000 |
Liz Earle | 119,000 |
Clarins | 79,000 |
Rituals | 77,200 |
Toni & Guy | 54,200 |
L’Oreal | 42,200 |
Dove | 33,900 |
Shea Moisture | 33,200 |
Bleach London | 33,000 |
Schwartzkopf | 28,200 |
The figures in these tables were taken using the Keyword Finder tool to look at the average monthly searches both worldwide and in the UK of the brands sold and listed on Boots’ website dropdown menu here.
When we’re searching for products online, especially if we’re not quite sure what it is we want just yet, we’re much more likely to search things like ‘shampoo’ into Google, rather than a specific brand. We wondered how many people in the UK were searching for products or equipment to help them achieve their perfect style, or at least to maintain their current one, from the comfort of their homes over the last 12 months.
Product | Average UK searches in 2019 | Average UK searches in 2020 | Average UK searches in 2021 |
Hair clippers | 45,883 | 308,833 | 72,444 |
Hair extensions | 66,125 | 72,000 | 68,000 |
Hair dye | 31,333 | 84,250 | 49,844 |
Purple shampoo | 22,692 | 35,567 | 26,800 |
Hair bleach | 12,042 | 31,392 | 20,278 |
Hairdressing scissors | 9,300 | 38,542 | 17,011 |
Tweezers | 10,850 | 15,175 | 14,867 |
Sugar wax | 5,683 | 8,442 | 16,289 |
Leave in conditioner | 7,500 | 11,467 | 10,878 |
Thinning scissors | 2,933 | 16,636 | 6,778 |
We used the Keyword Finder tool to find the average UK searches for each month in the year, then added these together and divided them by 12 to find the average searches overall for each year.
The three products with the biggest jumps in average yearly searches were:
And if there were any doubts that these spikes really were from the lockdown and not just part of the natural progression of searches over time, take a look at these Google Trends charts. As seen in this example, searches for ‘hair dye’ went up exponentially between March and April 2020, as reflected by our keyword data research.
Google searches over time for the term ‘hair dye’
As did searches for ‘hair clippers’. It’s clear to see when people started worrying about missing their barbers appointments just from the graph:
Google searches over time for the term ‘hair clippers’
When it comes to ‘hairdressing scissors’, the Google Trends graph shows the spike in UK adults searching for them during the 2020 lockdown. Looking at the trends in searches in the rest of the graph, it’s obvious that the spike in March/April 2020 isn’t just the natural progression of web searches, and that something specific triggered this spike, that ‘something’ being the first UK lockdown.
Google searches over time for the term ‘hairdressing scissors’
Certain items, like ‘purple shampoo’ for instance, aren’t quite as dramatic in their search volumes over time, though there are still clear jumps in searches at the time of the first UK lockdown.
Google searches over time for the term ‘purple shampoo’
The main items that do have this massive jump are ones that are simple to use (like hair dye), will last a while (like hairdressing scissors or clippers), or aren’t something that many people use themselves on a regular basis (like hair bleach). Most likely, the people who already used purple shampoo didn’t stop searching for it after the lockdown, but with the uptick of us searching for (and assumedly buying) hair bleach, it’s not a stretch to guess that those people will have also searched for a way to get rid of those brassy, yellow tones that often come with bleached hair.
Brands we analysed
The list of brands we analysed searches for was found on the Boots website here under the ‘brands’ dropdown menu on the left hand side of the screen. We used Boots’ list of hair care brands as we knew they stocked a wide range of hair and beauty products and that they shipped to customers both in the UK and around the world.
Things to note
It’s important to note that the search volumes obtained using the Keyword Finder tool may not accurately reflect the brand’s popularity in all instances. This is because people may conduct product-specific searches when shopping for items from each specific brand. For instance, someone may search for ‘hair serum’ which is what The Ordinary is most known for in terms of their hair care products, but this search does not contain the keyword ‘The Ordinary’.
It’s also possible for some individuals to have varying intent when searching for some of the above keywords. For instance, someone searching for ‘Dove’ may actually be searching for the species of bird. However to combat this, we made sure to only include keywords whose top ranking results pages were relevant to the brand itself. This means that it’s highly likely that the majority of searches for the keywords mentioned above were genuine brand searches.
We hope this roundup of all the latest statistics and facts on the hair care industry in 2021 - 2022 has proved useful in bringing you up to date with everything you need to know about the industry!
If you enjoyed this piece, check out our piece on Hair and Beauty Industry Statistics for the UK and Worldwide in 2021 - 2022 here for all the latest facts and figures in the world of beauty and hair care.
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