How much does it cost to look fake?

I wrote a post over at Chic Darling this afternoon about fake girls. While writing it, I got to thinking about how much time and money these girls must spend on themselves to look that “good”

I have assumed in my calculations that these women haven’t had any plastic surgery (both in part because I can’t calculate monthly costs of surgery and because not all fake girls have the same fake bits).

I assumed that the girls have fake nails, hair, tans, eye colour and that they wear a ton of make-up. If you have ever seen a Fake Girl, you know why I made these assumptions.

On to the math!*

Fake tanning: Google tells me that tanning costs about $30/month for an unlimited package on basic machines.
Fake hair: This site was helpful for pricing and timing hair extension costs. She charges $699 for the first application**, $299 for a 6 month reapplication and $50 removal fee at that 6 month application. Monthly cost? $87.42
Fake hair colour: Salon visits run about $200 every two months ($100 per month)
Fake nails: $40 a month in touch-ups
Make-up: Personally, I spend about $200 a year on my make-up and I don’t even wear it everyday or do anything over-the-top. I calculated $300 every 6 months for these Fake Girls ($50/month)
Coloured contacts: Clearly Contacts sells fake contacts 10/box for $20. While they are throwaway contacts, everyone I know reuses theirs so I calculated 5 boxes for the month ($100 per month)

My total comes to $407.42. In the most conservative estimate that I could conjure using all of my cost savings Google skills, these girls are easily spending more on their beauty than I do on my rent.

Now, how much time would it take to look fake?

Fake tanning: 3 sessions of 20 minutes for a total of 4 hours per months
Fake hair: 3 hours for the first application, 4 hours for 6 month reapplication (~35 minutes per month plus the extra time needed to wash and style)
Fake hair colour: Let’s be conservative again and say 2 hours every 2 months or 1 hour a month
Fake nails: 1 hour per month
Make-up: 30 minutes per day plus the time needed to paint on your eyebrows (I know — not all girls do this. It freaks me out enough to comment on it though). I’m assuming these girls wear make-up on the weekends so it comes to 15 hours per month
Coloured contacts: nominal (not counted)

Total time: 20 hours and 35 minutes per month. To look like this:

*My calculations are very conservative because I don’t want anyone to jump up and claim that my entire exercise is wrong because I overestimated the cost of tanning or something
**She states that some salons charge $1500 for an application and I totally believe her. Critical thinking time: If salons charge $1500 and she has a coupon for full extensions at $299, how much profit is a salon making? Makes you sick no?

All images are from here and here