Have You Ever Spent 76 Minutes Getting Ready For Work?

by Verena von Pfetten | 3:35 pm, June 1st, 2010

A recent study conducted by British retail chain Debenhams shows that women, on average, spend 57 more minutes getting ready for work on Mondays (76 minutes) than they do on Fridays (19 minutes) . And while this is both crazy and also somehow not surprising (we can barely get out of bed by the time Friday rolls around), what really astounded us about these findings was that anyone actually spent 76 minutes getting ready for work — on any day of the week.

According to Reuters, a full third of those 76 minutes were spent on hair, with “18 minutes on make-up, 16 minutes trying on different combinations of clothes and the rest taken up by showering and washing.”

Look, we clearly care a fair amount about our appearances — we write about fashion and style for a living — but 76 minutes would seriously cut into our beauty rest, which would in turn probably cut into our social lives.

Also, it’s amazing how seriously Debenhams spokesperson Ed Watson takes these findings. Regarding the fact that men fall from 28 minutes to 11 minutes between Monday and Wednesday, he told Reuters, “It’s clear that most men can only pay attention to their appearance for a maximum of two days before opting for an acceptable level of dishevelment.” An acceptable level of dishevelment? Men should count themselves so lucky that it only takes them 11 minutes!

On the fairer sex, Watson says, “Women try to keep their dress standards higher for longer, but by the time Friday comes, they too have gone down a line of least resistance.” While we’re not arguing that our morning routine is certainly catered around encountering the least amount of resistance possible, we had no idea this was such a bad thing. Maybe it takes us so little time to get ready because that extra hour of sleep saved us from spackling on concealer to cover our bags. Just sayin’.

[via Racked.]