Suse Global Color Meaning Database A Cross-Cultural Color Reference
Updated 2026-09
Founder & Lead Curator: Chloe Chen

Economic finding · relates to Pink

Women's personal-care products average 10.6 percent more

The finding

Cited claim

Moshary, Tuchman, and Bhatia Vajravelu, using three years of data from roughly 40,000 US stores across nine personal-care categories, find that women's products average 10.6 percent more than men's on a simple average across categories. They argue the gap largely reflects product differentiation rather than a uniform sex penalty, a careful result that the collection reports without overstating it as deliberate discrimination.

Why it is in the collection

Significance

The quantitative basis for the 'pink tax' branch of the project, reported with the authors' own caution about what the number does and does not mean.

Evidence type

How we know

Grade A. Large-scale price analysis, peer-reviewed.

Source

1 reference
  1. Moshary, S., Tuchman, A., & Bhatia Vajravelu, N. (2026). Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?. Marketing Science 45(1), 1-14. peer reviewed
    https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2023.1452

Cite this case record

Stable ID GCMD-C09

Chen, Chloe. “Women's personal-care products average 10.6 percent more.” Record GCMD-C09, Global Color Meaning Database (Suse), 2026. Accessed [date]. https://globalcolormeaning.org/entries/gcmd-c09.html.

The identifier GCMD-C09 is permanent: it does not change if the record text is revised. For an empirical number, also cite the underlying study listed below. See the how-to-cite page for full guidance.