In the case of lipsticks (Table 4 and Fig. 3b), 48% of all tested purple articles contained more than 1 mg/kg of lead, whereas this proportion was lower for the other colours (33% for brown, 30% for pink, and 14% for red). Even though this seemed to suggest a tendency of purple lipsticks to contain more lead than the items of different shade, and particularly than the red ones, statistically the average lead content for the various combinations of shades did not show any significant difference at 95% probability. Considering the important difference in lead content between lipsticks and lip glosses, the possible influence of the price on lead level was also evaluated for both lip product types separately. For lip glosses (Table 5), the one-tailed Student’s t-test did not show any statistically significant difference among the various price categories, but it has to be remembered that only 4% of all the lip glosses analysed (3 out of 74) contained more than 1 mg/kg of lead. On the contrary, in the case of lipsticks (Table 5), which presented 31% of items containing more than 1 mg/kg of lead (46 out of 149), the samples belonging to price category III statistically showed thehighest quality (lower lead content), followed by products in price categories I and I