A new study claims women buy more beauty products when the economy is down.
The recession is still hitting us hard four years after it began, and as a result, we’ve changed the way we shop, splurge and save money. But besides making us desperate for cash, are these hard economic times making us desperate for relationships too?
In short, yup, at least according to a controversial new study entitled “Boosting beauty in an economic decline: Mating, spending, and the lipstick effect,” in which researchers claim that the economic recession has “consistently increased women’s desire for products that increase attractiveness to mates — the first experimental demonstration of the lipstick effect.” Basically, we’re driven to buy beauty products in order to attract guys, particularly because of our need for financial security (which, apparently, we can only get from a man).
But some of us aren’t buying into this. Jezebel recently published a rebuttal in which they noted that, “the findings are based on information from a very narrow segment of women: young university students from the U.S. who said they were ‘highly motivated to attract a male romantic partner’ to begin with.” And, as anyone who took any form of lab in high school can tell you, having a wholly biased test group automatically makes any experiment or survey inaccurate. It sounds like these researchers were looking for a result that affirmed their stereotypical hypothesis: Women only get dolled up in order to nab men (not to feel better about ourselves), and we only want men for their big, fat wallets.
Read more here.
