In the research, published in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, the team found that aroma seemed not to be a major factor that affects people’s overall liking of the colour cosmetics product, whereas ‘brightness’, ‘dimness’ and ‘flakeness’ all made a bigger impact.
“This suggests that a nail polish company can focus on improving or minimising the effects of these sensory attributes in a certain domain with the help of descriptive sensory data, to achieve a higher consumer overall acceptability,” say the study authors.
“Cluster analysis showed four potential consumer segments based on their acceptability of different categories of nail polish samples. A nail polish company can promote a product using specific strategies according to the acceptability of that specific consumer segment.”
Based on this, nail polish manufacturers could look to improve their marketing strategies for specific categories of their products and target their advertising on particular consumer groups.
Findings
Looking into what sensory factors impact consumers' acceptability of nail polishes, the research team invited 98 females to participate in the study at the university.
Eight commercial products belonging to four categories, regular (REG), gel (GEL), flake (FLK) and water-based (WAT), were evaluated twice by each participant in two different tasks – a task devoted to applying and evaluating the product and a task devoted to observing the appearance and evaluating the product.
Pearson's correlation analysis, analysis of variance (ANOVA), external preference mapping, cluster analysis and internal preference mapping were applied for data analysis.
The tests found that participants' scores of overall liking of the nail polishes were similar in the application task and in the observation task.
In general, participants liked the REG and GEL product samples more than the FLK and WAT samples, and among all the sensory attributes, appearance attributes were the major factors that affected participants' overall liking.
The authors state that aroma seemed to be a minor factor to participants' overall liking.
Some sensory attributes, such as runny, shininess, opacity, spreadability, smoothness, coverage and wet appearance, were found to drive participants' overall acceptability positively, whereas others such as pinhole, fatty-edges, blister, brushlines, pearl-like, flake-protrusion, glittery and initial-drag impacted participants' overall acceptability negatively.
Four clusters of participants were identified according to their overall liking scores from both the application task and the observation task.