A Look at Sephora Foundation Reviews
As a makeup and skincare addict, I am naturally always finding myself on Sephora.com. Their website is addicting for me. So, when we were asked in one of my statistics classes to do a project of our choosing, I gravitated towards doing something with their website. Thus, I decided to scrape Sephora’s API, and subsequently Bazaarvoice’s API for review and product information, specifically pertaining to foundations sold at Sephora.
After scraping all of the information, it was time for the fun part, which is the actual analysis. I realized, very quickly, however, that there was no way to visualize all of the products in one plot without making it completely unreadable. Thus, I decided to group my foundations by brand. There were a couple of reasons that I did this:
- There are over 60 brands and over 217 foundations. 60 brands allowed me to group foundations easily but still not be overly broad.
- Each brand has their own standards for formulation of product, and customer bases tend to stick to a brand. For example, many beauty YouTubers will try new foundations from a brand and cite the fact that they liked a previous foundation from the same brand as their reasoning for trying the new foundation. In other words, brand loyalty is important in the makeup industry.
The first thing I chose to look at was the number of reviews per brand for foundations.
In total, Sephora has over 275,000 reviews for all of their foundations, and that number is growing every single day.
By brand, I also looked at average price and average rating by brand for foundation.
bareMinerals obviously has the highest number of reviews, even without looking at the previous plot, because it has almost no confidence interval. In other words, we can be more certain of the average rating of bareMinerals foundations compared to say, Koh Gen Do’s foundations because of the smaller width of the confidence interval. I will be getting back to this point in my next post. People also tend to rate Sephora foundations very highly. In fact, the average rating for all foundations at Sephora is a whopping 4.13 stars!
The last feature within brands that I wanted to look at was pricing. How does average price for foundation change between brands. The average foundation at Sephora is close to $40. That is a far cry from the average $10 to $15 foundation at a drugstore, but we hope that the quality makes up for the price difference.
Look at La Mer’s average foundation price $120! They are quite the bougie brand, I would say. Unsurprisingly, Sephora’s in-house brand, SEPHORA COLLECTION, is the cheapest brand of the lot with an average foundation price of under $25.
However, what I was truly interested in was if price has any effect on rating. In essence, are higher prices justified?
Most of the foundations surround the mean of price and average rating, which are $40 and 4.13 stars, respectively. However, many of the luxury brands such as Givenchy, Dior, Guerlain, Tom Ford, La Mer, Estèe Lauder, and Lâncome all find themselves somewhere closer to the top of the ratings distribution (except for La Mer, probably because of their ridiculous prices). Despite this fact, their prices actually vary quite a bit. Dior, Estée Lauder, and Lâncome, for example, all have average prices that are still over $40, but not too much so, and their ratings are just as high, if not higher than Giorgio Armani and Koh Gen Do (other luxury brands). Thus, while we do see some major price differences between luxury cosmetic brands for their foundations, that is not reflected in the difference in their average ratings.
I hope you enjoyed this look into Sephora reviews for foundations.
If you want to take a look at all I have done so far with this data (and how I got the data in the first place), please take a look at my Github, and please let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading!