Press-on nails as a recession indicator?
Women are skipping manicures?! (And, oh yeah, still drowning in child care and earning 85% of a man’s salary, but seriously, her nails!)
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published a story by internet culture reporter Ann-Marie Alcántara, “Young Women Are Starting to Recession-Proof Their Lives” (in print as “Young Women Tighten Their Budgets”).
The story opens with this eye-catching lede: “Call it a new recession indicator: Young women who not long ago splashed out on self care, tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and Barbie are pulling back on their spending.”
The story’s been making its way around the personal finance space because “young women as a recession indicator” is an intriguing take, and WSJ’s cachet lends credence to it. But, truly, this is little more than a newsy spin on “women be shoppin’.”
Throughout the brief piece — just under 950 words — the evidence Alcántara presents for a widespread “pulling back” is sparse. The first is that Google searches in the U.S. for “press on nails” and “blonde to brunette hair” are up, suggesting, apparently, that women are foregoing manicures and highlights to save money. The other is that spending by women on things like apparel and home decor was down 1% (while retail sales overall rose slightly).
It might feel like a fresh take among the recession-fearing general public consuming this story, tsk-tsking and thinking, Things must be pretty bad if women can’t even afford to be blonde anymore.
But whether or not women spend money on clothes and manicures and highlights is a pretty tired story in personal finance. We’ve been critiquing the way women spend money since the dawn of this industry. (In researching for You Don’t Need a Budget, I found a 1950 Boston Globe column teaching the frugal “career girl” how to “budget her bonnets,” detailing precisely the amount to spend: $15 per year.) Wondering whether press-on nails and brunette hair are indicative of an economic shift for which we have actual established indicators is a ridiculous distraction.
We’ve been critiquing the way women spend money since the dawn of this industry.
Whether Alcántara’s doing or an editor’s or just the restraints of word count and internet attention spans, the piece glosses over telling anecdotes and quotes in favor of the most superficial details. Alcántara shared the experiences of three 25- and 30-year-old women to illustrate their recession-indicating lifestyle changes.
We learn one woman, Miranda McClellan, had started skipping manicures, had considered skipping blonde highlights (which she ultimately went ahead with) and dyed faded sweatpants instead of buying new ones. Another, Aeyrn Briscoe, whose finances were tighter since she moved to Chicago after years of living in Central and South America and Europe, had cut out manicures, too, as well as streaming subscriptions and shopping. The third woman, Stephanie Umeh, had stopped ordering food delivery.
Telling women for decades to restrict their spending on such “irresponsible” luxuries and then sounding an economic alarm when they finally do? That’s truly the epitome of the budget culture mind games personal finance media tortures us with every day.
But there’s an untouched story under Alcántara’s story about what it means to be a young woman in our society and how that impacts women financially.
On being a Zillennial in the workforce, McClellan told WSJ, “The rules of the game have changed. I was told if I got a big corporate job I would have financial security and health care that would take care of everything and I could retire with a big 401(k).”
In addition to cancelling subscriptions and cooking her own food, Briscoe had also stopped going to weekly therapy — after being laid off. Now she used ChatGPT for therapy, a point the story includes without further questions.
“No one has an extra $200 to spend to talk to someone,” Briscoe told WSJ.
The headline of Umeh’s story is that she started riding the subway instead of paying for ride-share that sometimes topped $100. Except, the story adds, she “might justify the cost if it’s late and safety is a concern.”
I guess my question is: In a society where a woman is spending $100+ on Uber rides just to feel safe, why are we asking how much she spends on takeout? In a society where someone can lose vital health care with the loss of a job, why are we even mentioning whether she has a Netflix subscription? In a society where young people are completely disillusioned by the promises of employment and certain they’ll never retire no matter how much they sacrifice for work, why — WHY?! — are we talking about how much they spend on manicures and hair dye?
Maybe young women’s consumer habits are a new recession indicator. Probably not. But women have been sounding alarms long before this year’s historic stock-market dips got WSJ looking into the manicure index.
Maybe if “grab ‘em by the pussy” had been reviling enough to enough Americans in 2016, we’d have never paved the way for the fascist who rolled out the “Liberation Day” tariffs that promise to destroy our economy now.
Maybe if men had taken lessons from the #MeToo movement beyond you can’t say anything anymore, 55% of them wouldn’t have voted for a convicted serial rapist whose economic policy is literally from the Gilded Age.
Mothers were screaming at the top of their lungs during the pandemic lockdown about the support they needed. But even the most progressive Democratic administration in almost a century, with the opportunities for socialist policymaking that a national crisis presents, couldn’t institute basic parental leave or child care support for American families. A Republican-controlled legislature allowed the expiration of an expanded child tax credit that had instantly raised nearly 2.9 million children out of poverty. For all the headlines about our reckoning over the plight of mothers throughout the pandemic, when the dust settled, they were no better off than they’d been in 2019.
We have yet to see wage parity between men and women, more than 60 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed. Even among young people, age 25 to 34, women only earn 95% of what men earn.
We have yet to see wage parity among men and women, more than 60 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed.
Two-thirds of working mothers and almost half of all working women feel pressure to focus on domestic responsibilities, compared with just 45% of working fathers and 35% of all working men, respectively. Meanwhile, women feel similar pressure as men to support their families financially and to be successful at work.
None of us have enough time to go through an entire laundry list of ways women’s participation in our economy is fraught. (Oh, but before we go: also, Dobbs.) But here’s the point.
Calling young women a “new recession indicator” this year because they’ve been Googling brown hair is insulting (or, it would be, if it weren’t just the opportunistic repackaging of a social media trend). If anyone has been paying attention, women have been a clear indicator that this economic system is in crisis for a very long time — and they’ve been demanding solutions for longer than they’ve been allowed to vote.
A new play on the old lipstick index. Society likes to use women’s buying habits (especially on beautification) as an indicator with the implication always that women are frittering their funds away. From what I have seen women are usually more financially responsible and able to do more with so much less.
Thank you SO much for this! Can we stop vilifying people who are just trying to live, and start protecting each other (women, men, all genders)?