A Research on the Health Hazards by the Patterns of Beauty Care

20대 여성의 미용형태별 건강위해 실태조사

With the increasing number of women involved in social activities, beauty industry has flourished. More women than ever before are concerned about make-up, hair care, skin care, and weight control, etc. With the success and commercialization of beauty industry, unconfirmed beauty care services have been introduced in the market. However, the health hazard from diverse beauty care services has not been systematically addressed. This study has the following two purposes: 1) to examine the utilization pattern of diverse beauty care services; and 2) to examine the health hazard from beauty care services. For this study, two major universities located in Seoul area were selected. While 450 female college students were selected from one women's university, the other 450 were from mixed university. Using survey questionnaire, we interviewed with 900 female college students. The results are as follows: As for the beauty care patterns, makeup accounted for 78.6％, Skin care 49.5％, weight/body control 32.0％, hair care 81.5％, and cosmetic operation 14.9％, indicating significant high rates of makeup(x2=9.215, p=0.002) and hair care(x2=4.435, p=0.035) at both mixed and women's universities. The health hazard was measured using four questions. The past studies have not paid special attention to the methodological issue of how to ask health hazard. Depending on how to ask health hazard, the percentage of respondents reporting health problems varied. When the respondents were asked whether or not they had suffered health problems for a short period, over 60％ of respondents reported health problems; when they were asked in other ways-1) whether or not they had suffered health problems for a long period, 2) whether or not they had suffered whole body problems, 3) whether or not they had permanent traces on skin due to beauty care activities-, the percentage of respondents reporting health problems dropped substantially to less than 10％, This finding indicates the importance of ‘words’ used in questions. The relationships between health problems and utilization of beauty care services were examined, using χ2 test or t test. We found that there was a significant relationship between health problem and beauty care.