At first, it looked simple enough. In the campus convenience store, two familiar boxes of painkillers sat side by side: Panadol (Menstrual) and Panadol Extra. Both act for pain relief; Both contain paracetamol; And both occupy the same shelf. Yet one costs seventy cents more.
A few shelves down the aisle, Gillette’s men’s shaving foam sits in a blue canister. A pastel green Gillette “Satin Care” is seen right beside, and costs more than double that of the former. A hefty price for the 30 grams of additional foam in that canister, I thought.
But the math, it turns out, is inconsistent and does not support a simplistic conclusion of the consumer pink tax. The price gaps in reality are sometimes small, sometimes inverted, sometimes justified by technical differences. But the feeling that women’s products cost more, that pink quietly costs extra persists. And perhaps that persistence is the real phenomenon worth studying.
In Singapore, where the market is often treated as a mirror of reason, these price quirks take on symbolic weight. We often assume that if two things differ in price, the logic must be somewhere in the ingredients or production line. Yet in the case of the pink tax, reason somehow gives way to psychology and sentiment, or capitalism profiting from both of these.
A 2015 U.S. government study found that personal care products targeted to women were, on average, 13% more expensive than similar products for men. Taking on-campus stores, such a jarring distinction was not consistent. In some cases, the prices are identical, yet the products remain segregated by gender for no discernible reason. Pore strips, for instance, have two types, catered to men and women respectively, though the ingredients and cost are exactly the same. The difference lies purely in the label, as if gender itself were an active ingredient.
Picture two everyday products, for instance, a body wash, a toothbrush, or a pack of tissues. One comes in muted or darker tones, is angular, and employs words like power, and bold; the other comes in softer shades, is curved, and features words denoting softness, calmness with text or flowers. Both serve the same function, are likely made in the same factory, and sometimes cost exactly the same. Yet we rarely mistake one for the other. The packaging performs the separation for us. It signals an automated delineation that cleanliness can be masculine, that care can be feminine, that our choices are both rational and expressive. Even when the price is identical, the illusion of contrast remains intact. Pink tax is thus not limited to a showy price tag difference, but is evident in the careful choreography of cues that keep gender legible, in the most ordinary corners of consumer life and of course, profitable.
“Maybe the ingredients are the same, but I instinctively assume a lot of the time that products designed for men are more effective,” says Sarah (name made anonymous), a Year 3 FASS student I spoke to. “Male deodorants seem to have more ‘strength’ for example. I feel products for women are often designed around some stereotypes that maybe we don’t have that much body hair or sweat less. If I want something that actually works, I prefer looking at the men’s line first.”
This is where the “tax” seems to shift from economic to cultural. The economy has learned to translate gender into design, and consumers pay for the translation.
It is tempting to see this as a small retail quirk, but the logic runs deeper. Consider, for instance, how AI-driven pricing algorithms that are now widely used in e-commerce replicate human bias. A 2024 study by researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and IMDEA Networks found evidence of a ‘Digital Marketing Pink Tax,’ revealing that algorithms often charge advertisers significantly more: up to 64% in some categories to target female audiences. To offset these higher costs, the digital machinery is incentivized to steer women toward higher-margin, ‘premium’ products.
This is the digital echo of the convenience store shelf: a system where an interest in “wellness” or “beauty” signals a higher willingness to pay. In a supposedly neutral, data-driven space, the algorithm has probably learned that “femininity” is a profitable demographic marker.
In a society like Singapore where “overt” inequality is frowned upon, difference must disguise itself as preference. Singapore’s consumer culture, disciplined by efficiency and fairness, has perfected this dance. Our markets appear neutral, our choices empowered. And yet, we instinctively remain guided by invisible aesthetics that tell us what feels “right” to buy. The pink tax endures not in mere numbers, but in the confidence that packaging can still sell identity disguised as choice.
“I often see that men’s products are labelled with some rugged or “masculine” names and are marketed to feel more macho. We also get a smaller range of scents in everything and most of us are okay with it. Like vanilla, or floral scents are rarely seen in men’s products, but no one really questions it,” says Marcus (name made anonymous), a Year 2 Engineering student.
Perhaps this subtlety is what makes the phenomenon interesting in Singapore. The state’s obsession with rationality has trained consumers to trust the system’s fairness. As Marcus notes, we rarely question the shelves or notice that our consumer choices are silently engineered. We often may not suspect bias; we rather suspect our own indulgence. And so, the pink tax seems to slip through in daily life not as an injustice, but as a feeling. In particular, it is the quiet, almost guilty awareness that rationality and emotion have struck a truce on the retail shelf.
So how much for pink? Seventy cents, perhaps? Or maybe nothing at all. Maybe pink now costs only what we are willing to believe it’s worth – the price of a story, the comfort of recognition, the illusion of difference in a marketplace that otherwise insists on sameness.