Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the vainest of them all?
Uh, that would be men, according to a new survey done by the U.K. lifestyle brand Avaj, at least. The company asked 1,000 British adults about their grooming habits, and found that guys spend more time looking at themselves in the mirror (23 times a day) compared to women (who clock in at 16 glances).
Okay, so men check themselves out the most, yes. But it turns out "who’s more obsessed?" has a far more complicated answer.
While men, for the most part, look at themselves to admire their appearance, women in the survey were far more likely to cast a critical eye to reassure themselves that they look OK — and obsess over body parts that they feel most self-conscious about, according to the Daily Mail.
This more or less jives with an earlier poll from 2012 by another company, Simple Skincare, which found that 75 percent of the women who responded confessed that they hate looking in the mirror, with 39 percent saying it does a number on their self-confidence.
And this negativity doesn’t stop at the doorstep: half of the 2,000 women polled said they wouldn’t leave the house unless armed with a mirror to check their appearance during the day. (And 10 percent said they pulled out a compact mirror at least ten times in a single working day.)
Sure, we all like to look our best. But even so, maybe it’s time we adopted a newer, more forgiving mindset, which focused more on celebrating our perfectly pretty imperfections.
With all the strides we’ve made — female grads outnumbering men in college degrees, more women in positions of power, and a certain person targeting the White House — it seems incredibly wrong to be tripped up by something as trivial as our own reflections.
Let’s look past appearances, OK ladies?
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