My wife shared the old wives tale of "makeup sales increase with economic insecurity" so I went looking for some data to confirm it. Sadly, there isn't anything unexpected in the data as far as I can tell. Beauty sales declined as a result of covid but they picked back up shortly after.
What prompted the discussion was news of Macy closing 150 stores and refocusing on luxury retail (and implicitly luxury cosmetics). Even as e-commerce picked up, it only ate up new demand. Mckinsey suspects department stores sales will grow and perhaps that's part of Macy's motivations as well.
Another thing my wife mentioned is all the e-commerce makeup white labelling going on. She implied every online micro-celebrity has a line of their own much like male celebrities and hard liquor.1 Anyway, what do I know about makeup.
Footnotes
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If any big bitcoin podcasters are reading this. Why haven't you done this yet? ↩