Cardi, as usual, is onto something here. Although people who perform the brunt of the labor surrounding beauty, such as manicurists, hairstylists , and makeup artists , deserve to be paid well for their work, beauty products do have some of the highest markups of any industry ( an average of 78% as of 2013 ). This means that the people who buy them —who are primarily, though not exclusively, women — spend out of feeling compelled to shell out inflated prices for products that could conceivably be much cheaper.