Iran consuming 30% of ME’s cosmetics
Iran takes in 30 percent of the Middle East’s cosmetic products imports, which amounts to $2.1 billion a year.
This is while an international studies office in London has put Iran’s consumption of cosmetics at $5 billion a year.
The report says that most of the imported products are smuggled into the country.
The number of Iranian women using the products is estimated to stand at 17 million.
80 to 90 percent of Iran’s cosmetics market is filled with products from China, Turkey, and Thailand.
Each year worth $850 million cosmetic products are smuggled into Iran, whereas the legal import of the products is only $150 million.
Statistics show that while students share a big chunk of the consumption of cosmetics, the age for using the products has dropped to 14.
Market analyst Saied Samadi published a research paper in the Iranian quarterly magazine Development of Market Engineering in which he introduces the cosmetics market as one of the purest, fastest-growing, most attractive, yet least-known markets in Iran’s economy. He indicated that the cosmetics market is generally slighted by both manufacturers and investors.
Other than the issue of extra attention paid to foreign-made cosmetics, and the reality of some considering the Ministry of Health untrustworthy, some women solely and simply prefer to follow the trend of buying smuggled cosmetics at a high price to further relate to their peers. All of this, of course, is true mostly in the middle, upper middle and affluent classes of society.