Today I read on a news website that women have been buying fewer cosmetic products during the pandemic but that skin care products such as moisturizers sold well. Customers say that they feel liberated from expectations to wear smart work clothes and full make up while working at home and have instead prioritized self-care while stuck at home and it appears obvious that the drop in lipstick sales ran in parallel to increased sales of face-masks. Why wear lipstick under a mask, after all. Yet it is received wisdom that in hard times lipstick sales usually increase. I suspect that lipstick sales increase with increased risk to life and livelihood. In urban areas where there is risk of dying young in street violence, people have children very young, often as teenagers. Reproduce early when there is high risk of an early death, another example of the daily truths of evolutionary biology. More lipstick when the economy is in downturn could be a similar example.
I would speculate that this is all rather driven by basic drivers from evolutionary biology, the usual suspects. Women compete with other women for mates. Men try to intimidate their competition, other men. So women wear make-up and attractive clothes and go to the gym with the aim to be more attractive. Men bulk up their shoulders and arms and grow beards to display high testosterone to competing males. Of course this is not the whole story and people can exercise free choice and there are cultural factors but evolutionary drivers are stronger and more obvious than most people seem to think.
So coming back to the pandemic, women at home during lock-downs or working from home have fewer direct contact with potential competitors and so it makes evolutionary sense that there is less need to look more attractive in order to compete with other women; hence lower make-up sales. I notice fewer bulked-up steroid abusing men in the streets these days and I wonder if also men feel less need to intimidate potential rivals. There was an initial flurry of exercise activity at home at the start of the pandemic which had more to do with suddenly having more free time to exercise and weights were sold out online rather quickly but has it lasted? Looking around in the streets I think not.
When shops opened up again, many women were desperate to go to the hairdressers and male barbers pushed full beard maintenance. Back to the old ways, compete, compete, compete.
Liam Mor's Blog