How One TikTok Star Is Breaking Down the Value of Beauty Products Using Her Investment Banking Skills
Out with so-called “girl math,” in with beauty math — Rachel Wiseman‘s version, at least.
With a fledgling investment banking career on one hand and a love for beauty on the other, the content creator — who splits her time between Toronto and San Francisco — is carving out her own lane on TikTok by breaking down the price versus value of the platform’s most-loved beauty products.
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Summer Fridays‘ new Dream Lip Oil, which retails for 35 Canadian dollars and contains 0.15 fluid ounces of product, nets out at roughly 233 Canadian dollars per fluid ounce, she deduces in one recent video that garnered 450,000 views.
“Now that number, in isolation, means nothing,” she continues, shifting focus to Summer Fridays’ peers in the lip category — Dior, Clarins, Kosas, Gisou and most recently, Haus Labs. Dior’s cult-favorite lip oil emerges as the most costly in terms of value — 270 Canadian dollars per fluid ounce — while Haus Labs, which nets out at 144 Canadian dollars per ounce, is the most cost-effective by the metric.
“The point of my page is to educate people and give them the tools to make these decisions for themselves,” said Wiseman, 22, who has amassed a TikTok following of 130,000 users and counting.
In addition to comparing the value of popular beauty offerings by category, the recent Queen’s University graduate newly introduced a Finance 101 “Get Ready With Me” series in which she offers up investing tips whilst doing her makeup.
“There’s a lot of synergy between my [full-time] job and content creation,” said Wiseman, who often leverages the two to chime in on the beauty discourse du jour; for example when Haus Labs introduced its rebranded Color Fuse blushes this month and consumers wondered whether the smaller pan size equated to a drop in value, too.
“It was a little pricier on that basis,” said Wiseman, who found that the OG version netted out to about 129 Canadian dollars per ounce while the new version, which was .21 ounces smaller and not quite commensurately priced down, hovers at about 244 Canadian dollars per ounce. Notably though, the rebrand actually put the product more on par with the value of similar blush offerings like the NARS Cosmetics Blush and Makeup by Mario’s Soft Pop Powder Blush — 275 Canadian dollars and 237 Canadian dollars per ounce, respectively.
“Pat McGrath’s [Skin Fetish] blush is a pricier one, but it was the cheapest by a per-ounce basis out of the ones I compared, which to me justifies making the purchase,” said Wiseman, whose fusion of beauty and finance content is resonating with a growing crop of highly informed beauty consumers.
“So much beauty content is so similar and sometimes it feels oversaturated and just doesn’t land with consumers — highlighting specific things like value of a product or brand, that can be differentiating for an audience rather than just being another influencer on the For You page,” she said.
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