The Lipstick Effect
When the economy tanks, small luxuries sell harder. Here's why your broke era still buys the nice lip oil.
Grounded in the research on the lipstick effect
1930s: the Depression tell
First sighting: the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1933 US industrial output roughly halved, factories shuttered, people lined up at soup kitchens. But cosmetics sales rose. Couldn't afford a car or a house, so you bought the one nice thing you could still hold. Nobody named it yet, but the pattern was already there in the receipts: misery up, lipstick up.
Nov 2001: Lauder names it
Leonard Lauder, chairman of Estee Lauder, watched lipstick sales jump about 11% in the months after 9/11 while the wider economy stalled. He called it the 'lipstick index' and pitched it as an informal recession barometer. People kept the small treat and cut the big spend. The phrase stuck, mostly because it sounded like a stock ticker for your insecurity.