The chart drew criticism on social media for not accounting for the amount of product in each foundation stick when comparing prices. On TikTok, content creator Kere Eke, who uses the handle @kereeke, said in a video, “I hate this graph because it doesn’t normalize it based on the size or how much product you’re actually getting…I think the standard in beauty should be to report this number in addition to the number you’re actually paying.”

To account for product size, we created a table comparing the sticks on a price-per-gram basis. Merit’s position on the price spectrum didn’t change significantly. On a per-gram basis, its stick is priced at $5.85, compared to $6.86 for Charlotte Tilbury, $5.70 for Dior and $3.86 for LYS Beauty. The recalculation, however, underscores the relative value offered by LYS Beauty and Dior.

This exercise got us thinking about the messages prices convey and how consumers interpret value in beauty, a category where price-per-unit comparisons are rarely part of everyday shopping behavior. For this edition of our No Stupid Questions series, we asked 14 consultants, retailers, founders, content creators and more the following: Are consumers becoming more sophisticated about how they evaluate pricing today? What signals are shoppers using to judge value: price, product size, ingredients, performance or creator influence? How are perceptions of price shifting in today’s market, and how should brands respond?