Calling all beauty addicts! Glamour has now created a pretty addictive feature called The Lipstick Index. It is part of Glamour’s Lipstick.com website. Users can analyze the overall most popular beauty trends of the day, trends according to categories such as skin, hair, makeup, nails, and fragrance and check out the biggest beauty influencers on consumers. Then, you can also read in depth features on each category. Essentially, Glamour has created something more addictive than Pinterest.
So how does The Lipstick Index work? It uses an algorithm that goes through millions of online blog posts and social media posts to determine the top 25 trends each hour. This is not only meant to help consumers, but marketing teams of beauty brands as well to “pinpoint targeted ads” (WSJ). It’s like the S&P 500 but for beauty bloggers/addicts. Instead of changing your stock portfolio, you can change your Sephora wishlist.
Hearing about Glamour’s new tool prompted me to look more into the term “Lipstick Index” and I found some pretty cool information about it. The idea of the Lipstick Index was created by the chairman of Estee Lauder after the makeup brand’s sales actually increased despite the (small) recession from the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000’s. He believed lipstick could be an economic indicator and negatively correlated to a strong economy. It was thought that make up had become a luxury substitute for fancy clothing when women’s incomes fell. However, after the housing bubble burst and the 2009 recession occurred, sales for lipstick also dropped when income fell so this theory was discredited. Despite this, Lauder and others think that nail polish became the new “lipstick” due to the nail art trend at that time. The main point is that the little trends that affect your beauty regime may have a greater meaning for the spending trends of the country (which gives me more justification for a trip to Sephora!).
True or not (but, honestly, probably not), as a business nerd who also loves make up, I still find this interesting.
Sources:
http://business.time.com/2011/09/14/what-lipstick-tells-us-about-the-economy/