The price of pretty

Americans spend $1,754 annually on beauty, but it's not just vanity — attractive people earn 5-15% more. The economics of pretty privilege...

I got Botox for the first time when I was 23. I was influenced, I thought it would be preventative, it was dumb, I spent Thanksgiving being extra emotive because my forehead wouldn’t move. I was $330 poorer and somehow convinced myself I was being “responsible about aging” — as if that was even a thing.

For the purposes of this newsletter, I tried to roughly estimate how much I had spent on the vague category of “beauty” over my lifetime. It became so painful and cringe-worthy that I stopped, but it’s likely in the thousands (maybe even a few ten thousands) of dollars.

Beauty spending occupies this weird psychological space where normal logic doesn't apply. We tell ourselves we're "investing" in our appearance, as if our face were a stock portfolio.

Americans spend an average of $1,754 per year on beauty products and services. But raw numbers don't capture the complexity of beauty spending or why we're willing to go into debt for the promise of looking better.

Beauty isn't just about vanity. It's about economics, status, identity, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that how we look affects how much money we make, how people treat us, and how we see ourselves.

Pretty privilege isn't just a concept — it's a paycheck

Being attractive literally pays. Studies consistently show that attractive people earn 5-15% more than their "average" peers, with some estimates putting the "beauty premium" as high as $20,000 annually.

This isn’t exclusive to industries where appearance seems more relevant, like acting or modeling.

Better-looking professors get higher teaching evaluations. Advertising firms with attractive executives have higher revenues. Attractive servers earn roughly $1,261 more per year than their less conventionally attractive colleagues. Even bank CEOs — people whose job performance should theoretically have nothing to do with their jawline — see massive compensation differences, with good-looking bank CEOs earning over $1 million more than their less attractive peers.

The beauty premium extends beyond just salary. Attractive people get more callbacks for jobs, are perceived as more moral, trustworthy, and capable, and even benefit from what researchers call "beauty perks" — additional workplace benefits and opportunities that aren't available to everyone.

Your face as a financial strategy

In this context, beauty spending starts to look less like vanity and more like career development. If being attractive can boost your income by thousands of dollars annually, suddenly that Botox doesn't seem so frivolous.

This is how we end up with the concept of “investing in your appearance" — a mental framework that allows us to spend money we don't have on beauty treatments by framing them as investments in our earning potential. The logic goes: if I look better, I'll make more money, so this expenditure will pay for itself.

Another powerful trick our brains plays on us is mental accounting — the way we treat money differently depending on how we categorize it. Beauty spending gets placed in the "investment" or "self-care" category, which makes it feel different from other types of spending.

This is how we end up justifying a $200 facial while simultaneously complaining about a $50 utility bill. The facial feels like we're doing something positive for ourselves, while the utility bill feels like money disappearing into the void. Both are just money leaving our bank account, but our brains don't process them the same way.

Beauty culture has also increasingly borrowed language from productivity and self-optimization culture. We "hack" our skincare routines, "optimize" our appearance, and treat our bodies like projects to be perfected through the right combination of products and procedures.

This, in turn, promises control through consumption. The message is that if you just try hard enough, buy the right products, and follow the right routines, you can optimize your way to attractiveness.

Aging, consumerism, and why we’ll pay our way out of getting old

We’re obsessed with celebrity face lifts, the kind that make you look 30 years younger. We spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on erasing every wrinkle, googling cosmetic procedures, and the like.

There’s an economic reason behind this. Western societies often place a high value on youth, associating it with beauty, vitality, and success. Your worth is tied to your productive capacity, and aging is seen as evidence of declining productivity. It doesn't matter if this stereotype is accurate — what matters is that it drives economic behavior and corporate decision-making.

Beauty companies have turned this manufactured anxiety into a gold mine. The anti-aging industry generates billions by selling the promise that you can delay your economic obsolescence through the right combination of products and procedures. They've essentially monetized our fear of becoming irrelevant as we age.

The expensive reality of staying "hot" in the digital age

Social media didn't create beauty culture, but it supercharged it in ways that are fundamentally changing how much we spend — and why.

When everyone is a beauty influencer

The traditional beauty industry used to rely on aspirational advertising — showing us models and celebrities whose lives seemed impossibly glamorous. Social media replaced that with something much more powerful: Showing us “regular” people who appear to be living better lives than we are.

The democratization of influence means that beauty standards are no longer set by a small group of professionals, but by anyone with a ring light and a decent camera. This fact, and the sheer speed at which social media exacerbates trends, has created constantly escalating standards for what counts as baseline attractiveness.

The hot girl economy: When beauty becomes business

Social media has created entirely new economic ecosystems where young women (and young men) can monetize their appearance in ways that previous generations couldn't.

This isn't limited to traditional sex work or modeling. Regular college students and young professionals are finding that maintaining an attractive social media presence can lead to opportunities, free products, and even direct financial support.

But this creates a vicious cycle: the more your income depends on your appearance, the more pressure you feel to maintain and enhance that appearance. Women whose livelihood depends on looking a certain way face unique financial pressure to invest in beauty treatments.

The lipstick effect: Why we spend more when we can afford less

The "lipstick effect" refers to the tendency for cosmetics sales to increase during economic recessions. The theory is that when people can't afford major luxuries like vacations or new cars, they compensate by buying smaller luxuries that still provide a sense of indulgence.

Humans have a fundamental need for control, and when control is taken away in one domain (like job security or financial stability), we try to exert it in others. Beauty spending provides a sense of agency when other areas of life feel chaotic or unpredictable.

This is why financial stress often leads to increased beauty spending. When your budget is tight, buying a $25 face mask can offer immediate psychological relief and a sense of doing something positive for yourself, even if it adds up over time.

Social media platforms amplify the lipstick effect by creating artificial urgency and social pressure around beauty products. Before, when you saw a product you liked, you had to go to a mall to buy it. Now, you can purchase thousands of dollars worth of beauty goods without leaving your couch. And the social proof of social media makes it feel like “everyone” is using these products, and you’ll miss out if you’re not using it, too.

83% of Gen Z women say they have bought beauty products because content creators recommended them on TikTok, and 53% of Gen Z turn to TikTok for beauty inspiration. The problem isn't just that they're being influenced — it's that the influence is constant, personalized, and designed to feel like organic discovery rather than advertising.

The intersection of money psychology & beauty

The financial impact of beauty culture goes beyond what we spend on products. It changes how we think about money, identity, and self-worth.

The most expensive beauty purchases aren't really about the products themselves — they're about the identity we think we're buying into. When someone spends $500 on a skincare routine, they're not just buying moisturizer. They're buying into the identity of being "someone who takes care of themselves" or "someone who has their life together."

This is psychologically different from other types of spending because identity purchases often resist rational analysis. When you're buying into who you think you are (or who you want other people to see you have), price becomes almost irrelevant because you can't put a price tag on your sense of self.

Once you've invested in a beauty routine, it becomes psychologically difficult to scale back because of the sunk cost fallacy. If you've already spent hundreds of dollars on skincare products, stopping the routine feels like admitting that money was wasted. So you continue spending, not because the routine is worth the cost, but because you can't bear to admit it never was.

The real cost of beauty culture

The financial impact of beauty culture shapes our relationship with money, our sense of self-worth, and our economic priorities.

Opportunity cost and compound regret

Every dollar spent on beauty products is a dollar not invested in building actual wealth. For young people especially, the opportunity cost of beauty spending can be enormous when you consider the power of compound interest.

That $350 you’re spending monthly on your hair, nails and eyebrows could be $350 monthly invested in an index fund. Over 30 years, assuming a 7% annual return, that would grow to over $420,000.

But framing beauty spending purely in terms of opportunity cost misses the psychological complexity. For many people, especially women, beauty spending isn't optional — it's a requirement for economic and social participation.

The debt cycle of beauty spending

27% of both Gen Z and millennials have gone into debt as a result of beauty spending, and 33% of consumers have regretted overspending on beauty products. But beauty debt is particularly insidious because it often accumulates gradually through small purchases rather than one large splurge.

A $25 face mask here, a $40 foundation there, a $60 monthly subscription box — none of these purchases feel significant individually, but they add up to substantial amounts over time. This means we often don't realize how much we're spending on beauty until we add it all up. Beauty debt also tends to be emotionally charged, which makes it harder to address rationally.

The mental health cost

The constant pressure to maintain appearance standards takes a psychological toll that's hard to quantify but impossible to ignore. Research shows that adherence to beauty norms is tied to both benefits and costs — while attractive people enjoy economic advantages, the pressure to maintain those standards can contribute to anxiety, depression, and financial stress.

The time cost is also significant. Studies show that women spend considerable time on appearance-enhancing behaviors, time that could be spent on career development, relationships, or other activities that contribute to well-being.

The bigger picture: What beauty culture costs society

Individual beauty spending is part of a larger economic system that extracts wealth from consumers — particularly women — while promising benefits that may or may not materialize.

Women consistently spend more on beauty than men, creating what's essentially a gender-based wealth tax (sometimes known as the “pink tax”). Over a lifetime, this difference can amount to tens of thousands of dollars that could have been invested in wealth-building instead.

Social media has democratized beauty culture in some ways — anyone can become a beauty influencer, and diverse beauty standards are more visible than ever (though there is still work to be done, for sure). But it's also democratized insecurity by making beauty standards visible and immediate in ways they never were before.

Beauty standards often require disposable income that not everyone has, which can amplify economic inequality. People with more money can afford better beauty treatments, which can improve their economic prospects, which gives them more money to spend on beauty treatments. As the saying goes, “You’re not just ugly, you’re just poor.”

Breaking the beauty spending cycle

The most important shift is learning to separate what you buy from who you are. When you catch yourself thinking "I'm the type of person who..." in relation to beauty products, pause and ask whether that identity is serving your financial goals.

This doesn't mean abandoning beauty spending entirely, but rather making more conscious choices about which aspects of beauty culture align with your values and priorities. You can choose to invest in skincare for health reasons while skipping expensive makeup. You can get a basic haircut while avoiding expensive color treatments.

The goal is to make beauty spending a conscious choice rather than an automatic response to marketing or social pressure.

Before making any beauty purchase over a certain amount (like $50 or $100), ask yourself three questions:

1. Is this about how I feel about myself or how others perceive me?

2. Am I buying a product or buying into an identity?

3. What would happen if I didn't make this purchase?

These questions can help you spend more intentionally on things that actually matter to you rather than reflexively responding to marketing or social pressure.

If you're spending more on beauty than you're comfortable with, the most sustainable approach is gradual reduction rather than dramatic cuts. Pick one category of beauty spending to reduce each month — maybe switching from expensive skincare to drugstore alternatives, or extending the time between hair appointments.

The real beauty investment

The beauty industry will always have a financial incentive to make you feel insecure about your appearance. Your job is to recognize that incentive and make choices that serve your actual goals rather than their profit margins.

Beauty culture isn't going anywhere, and neither is the economic reality that appearance affects opportunities. But you can choose how much of your financial and emotional energy you're willing to invest in a system that profits from your insecurities.

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Until next week,
Hanna