Recessions mean that Ferraris stay in showrooms and designer dresses on shop racks, but lipstick bucks the trend: in difficult times, women buy more of it, since it is an affordable indulgence. That, at least, is the idea behind the "lipstick index", a term coined by Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estee Lauder, a cosmetics firm, in the 2001 recession. In the gloomy autumn of 2001, lipstick sales in America increased by 11%.rnBelievers in the lipstick theory trace the phenomenon back to the Depression, when cosmetic sales increased by 25%, despite the convulsing economy. Some, like Dhaval Joshi of RAB Capital, an investment-management firm, point out that employment in the cosmetics industry has been known to rise as overall employment falls, suggesting that demand for cosmetics increases when consumer confidence is low.
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