Recession Comforts: Louboutins Or Lipstick?
When I was 13 years old, my mother finally relented and allowed me to begin wearing some make-up.
All of my other friends at the time were allowed to wear full make-up. But at 13, my mum only let me dabble with powder and blush. For some extra color, I was allowed to wear lipstick. But the color could not be too dark. I didn't care though... I would take what ever I could get.
So from about the ages of 13 to 18, I was hooked on lipstick. I wore it every day, and reapplied it many times throughout the day. I never went anywhere without a touch of mauve on my lips. Then I turned 18 and went to college. And out went any efforts with make-up during the daytime. Since university, I've made efforts to wear lipstick from time to time. But it wasn't as exciting to put it on as it was when I was a teen. It feels fake to wear it. So, for the most part, I don't. But I may have found something that could change my attitude towards it...
An article in yesterday's Styles section discussed the idea of self-medicating one's Louboutin addiction with lipstick instead. The gist of the article was: when there's an economic downturn, sales of luxury goods go down, and sales of lipstick go up.
"Is that true?" I thought. "Do people really get the same satisfaction out of buying lipstick as they do a pair of red-soled stilettos?"
Apparently it is. The article had data that showed in the last downturn a few years back, "Mr. (Leonard) Lauder noticed that his company (Estée Lauder) was selling more lipstick than usual. He hypothesized that lipstick purchases are a way to gauge the economy. When it’s shaky, he said, sales increase as women boost their mood with inexpensive lipstick purchases instead of $500 slingbacks."
Now, in the last economic downturn in the US, I had no money. I was living in Brooklyn, working for the Evil Empire, and I styled myself with Old Navy and Banana Republic items on sale. Make-up wasn't a priority then. But neither were expensive shoes. A luxury purchase in shoes for me was hitting the Kenneth Cole store on lower 5th Avenue and splurging on a pair of $90 red sneakers. But I didn't forgo my once a year sneaker habit and shoot for lipstick instead.
Now that I have a little disposable income in this new economic downturn, I may think a little more before I go out and purchase a new pair of shoes... But I probably won't forgo them either in favor of lipstick. I will just be more particular about plopping down my bankcard to buy a pair. I could go without them if I had to.
If you like to treat yourself to the occasional luxury good, could you forgo it and be happy with lipstick instead? Or would you be like me and not get either, if you couldn't afford the luxury good?
All of my other friends at the time were allowed to wear full make-up. But at 13, my mum only let me dabble with powder and blush. For some extra color, I was allowed to wear lipstick. But the color could not be too dark. I didn't care though... I would take what ever I could get.
So from about the ages of 13 to 18, I was hooked on lipstick. I wore it every day, and reapplied it many times throughout the day. I never went anywhere without a touch of mauve on my lips. Then I turned 18 and went to college. And out went any efforts with make-up during the daytime. Since university, I've made efforts to wear lipstick from time to time. But it wasn't as exciting to put it on as it was when I was a teen. It feels fake to wear it. So, for the most part, I don't. But I may have found something that could change my attitude towards it...
An article in yesterday's Styles section discussed the idea of self-medicating one's Louboutin addiction with lipstick instead. The gist of the article was: when there's an economic downturn, sales of luxury goods go down, and sales of lipstick go up.
"Is that true?" I thought. "Do people really get the same satisfaction out of buying lipstick as they do a pair of red-soled stilettos?"
Apparently it is. The article had data that showed in the last downturn a few years back, "Mr. (Leonard) Lauder noticed that his company (Estée Lauder) was selling more lipstick than usual. He hypothesized that lipstick purchases are a way to gauge the economy. When it’s shaky, he said, sales increase as women boost their mood with inexpensive lipstick purchases instead of $500 slingbacks."
Now, in the last economic downturn in the US, I had no money. I was living in Brooklyn, working for the Evil Empire, and I styled myself with Old Navy and Banana Republic items on sale. Make-up wasn't a priority then. But neither were expensive shoes. A luxury purchase in shoes for me was hitting the Kenneth Cole store on lower 5th Avenue and splurging on a pair of $90 red sneakers. But I didn't forgo my once a year sneaker habit and shoot for lipstick instead.
Now that I have a little disposable income in this new economic downturn, I may think a little more before I go out and purchase a new pair of shoes... But I probably won't forgo them either in favor of lipstick. I will just be more particular about plopping down my bankcard to buy a pair. I could go without them if I had to.
If you like to treat yourself to the occasional luxury good, could you forgo it and be happy with lipstick instead? Or would you be like me and not get either, if you couldn't afford the luxury good?
Comments
~ miss J
~~~~~
An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.