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The Hot Girl
Hamster Wheel
We don't consider the gender gap in time and money spent on beauty, but time and money matter. They're essential sources of power and influence and also major sources of freedom.
-Dr. Renee Engeln, beauty sick
One of the more challenging tasks I set out to complete when my personal finance journey began was getting a real handle on my expenses. Surprisingly, I found that my fixed expenses (home, car, other needs)-areas I was warned were troublesome for most-actually weren't too bad. I had a roommate, my car was relatively affordable, and I lived in an apartment complex that was built in the '90s and looked like it. In many important ways, I lived comfortably beneath my means.
But there was one notable outlier: My Hot Girl category was staggering. Based on an early inventory, I calculated that I was spending:
$200 every three months for my cut and color
$100 per month on eyelash extensions
$15 per month on eyebrow threading
$100 per month on manicures and pedicures
$500 per year on makeup
The first time I examined these expenses in their totality, I thought my calculator had added an extraneous zero. After confirming it was, in fact, a totally warranted zero, I knew I couldn't justify this superficial hemorrhaging any longer. So in 2019, I decided it was time to hop off the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel-at least temporarily.
The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel is a term I coined that describes the litany of rotating, recurring expenses necessary to make one "conventionally attractive." When you're on the hamster wheel, every dollar spent functions like a commitment to spend more in the future-your body will eventually reject the modifications, often leaving you aesthetically "worse" than you started (think chipping gel polish and brittle nails underneath or brassy, grown-out highlights that must be corrected). As a former Hot Girl, I'm all too familiar with the financial trials and tribulations of attempting to maintain some semblance of an acceptable "feminine" appearance, and the most common iteration went a little something like this:
1. Feel bad about self for some generalized reason, then notice (in rapid, horrifying succession) that my roots were growing out, my ends were split, my gel nails were peeling, my legs were pale and hairy, and-oh yeah!-I was stressed.
2. Panic-schedule a full day of back-to-back primp appointments.
3. Attend said appointments in order: facial, eyebrow threading, cut and color, manicure/pedicure, spray tan and chill.
4. Feel increasingly uncomfortable calculating the accumulating 20 percent tips at each and every vendor (and swipe the AmEx with less and less enthusiasm).
5. Bask in glory of retaining Hot Girl status for another two to three weeks, and then quickly realize that not only do I feel no different, but it's already almost time to re-up.
I'm hyperbolizing, of course, but the general framework followed a predictable pattern. Perhaps the most unnerving part of this NASCAR-pit-stop-style tour of Dallas's beauty providers was the way in which these habits eventually became my baseline state: When I sensed I was deviating too far away from it, a crisis of confidence ensued, and the cycle would repeat anew.
When I annualized my spending and broke it down to monthly averages, I realized I was spending about $320 per month (*chokes* that's $3,840 per year) on being pretty. Depending on how much you earn, this number could be reasonable-but at the time, I was taking home about $1,500 every two weeks, which meant I worked for more than an entire month each year solely to maintain my Acceptable Feminine Appearance.
But while I was swiping, tapping, and inserting my chip card's merry way through the Tour de Texas Salons, there was something deeper at play. The women at my office had manicured nails. The women I spent time with on the weekends had full sets of lashes and highlights. In Dallas, most of the women I encountered on a daily basis were similarly pledging their time, energy, and money to keeping up appearances. Yet I didn't see my boyfriend at the time (now husband) traipsing to the salon every other month to get his color refreshed or schlepping to the pedicure chair biweekly to get his cuticles pushed back. Even before I learned about how beauty consumerism functions to keep women on the financial, metaphoric, and often literal treadmill, it always struck me as profoundly unfair that (what felt like) my default condition required so much more time, effort, and money than the men in my life spent on theirs.
When you itemize the expenses so plainly, it seems obvious that beauty consumerism's laser-like offensive on women's self-image will materially impact our financial outcomes. But when I was building my first budget, the topic was almost entirely absent from the instructional material I was mainlining. In her essay "In the Name of Beauty," Tressie McMillan Cottom summarizes this exchange of value perfectly: "If I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market." If we want to make honest progress toward financial independence, that means taking a necessary hard look at how industries that exist to infiltrate our psyches (and checking accounts) are impacting our goals.
It's worth stating explicitly that these industries aren't the primary reason why many women don't make financial progress. A mani/pedi is expressly not to blame for wage stagnation or the shrinking middle class. But if you're a woman who suffers from money anxiety and has a self-care routine akin to 2018 Katie (who had a variety of acrylic products adhered to every surface of her body), I feel confident that your hard-earned income will serve you more powerfully from the safety of a Roth IRA than in a $50 vitamin C serum.
Calculating the true cost
For the sake of argument, let's return to my routine and pretend I had extended it over the course of my lifetime-or, at least, the next forty years. Tapping my trusty compounding returns calculator (a magical device that shows how your money can earn money over time), prepare to be horrified at the opportunity cost of a lifetime of "conventional" beauty, at a sticker price of $320 per month. Had that money been invested each month for forty years in a cheap total US stock market index fund like VTSAX, returning a historically average return of around 8 percent per year, the opportunity cost is $1,001,728.88.
One million dollars.
For some nauseating context, an investment portfolio worth $1,000,000 is enough to reliably produce a monthly income of approximately $3,333 in perpetuity. The median American aged sixty-five through seventy-four hits retirement with around $200,000 in savings, and gets an average of $1,907 per month from Social Security. These are not costs at the margins; these are retirement-supporting amounts.
It turns out my spending was pretty indicative of the national average for women who report regularly spending on their appearance: The average American woman spends $3,756 per year on beauty (the figure for men who reported regularly spending on their appearance was $2,928 per year, which surprised me, as the men in my life are the quintessential "7-in-1 body wash" consumers). If you assume the average American man is investing only the cost difference of $800 per year for forty years, they'd hit retirement with $206,606 more. Even if we're comfortable with that value exchange in our own lives, I'm not sure many of us are aware that's the trade-off we're making. I know I wasn't.
Frustratingly, any mention of these budgetary inclusions was mysteriously absent from most of the personal finance books and blogs I frequented. How come many of my favorite writers, like Brad and John and Brandon and Nick and Jack, weren't covering how to cope with a balayage routine gone rogue?!
To fully understand what I was up against, I had to contend with the long, troubling history of the way aesthetic norms have been used to police women's behavior and access to resources in our post-industrial world.
Beauty, status, and billions
If all of this feels silly or superficial, consider the fact that beauty and personal care is a $100 billion industry in the US and a $624 billion industry worldwide as of 2024. The US is the top spender. It's big business, and those dollars are extracted from the personal wealth of (largely) women, in our effort to exchange our actual capital for the social capital one can derive from maintaining Hot Girl status. Beauty is the form of power that girls and women are socialized to value most. Unlike financial capital, which compounds and grows more powerful as you age, beauty is capital that-in our current paradigm's idea of "beauty," which usually just means "youth"-decays as you get older, requiring more and more money to extend its half-life. Investing your money in the capital of beauty guarantees a long-term proposition of deterioration.
While the exact breakdown of "culture" and "biology" that informs what's considered "attractive" isn't totally clear, history lends us some clues about what influences our changing norms. Western beauty standards are informed by Eurocentric ideals of beauty that treat whiteness as the default (and fetishize "exoticized" ideals of Black or brown beauty), which usually means a certain body type, a general appearance of hairlessness where hair "shouldn't be," and straight, thick, shiny hair where it "should be."
What's considered "beautiful" seems to track closely over time with whatever connotes upper-class status. "[In Victorian England,] women were literally powdering their faces with arsenic and lead to appear as white as possible," beauty and culture critic Jessica DeFino told me. "Paleness" was seen as beautiful because working-class people were outside all day in the fields, and they had tanned skin. This changed with the Industrial Revolution, when low-income workers shifted into factories and were no longer in the sun all the time. "The upper classes have leisure money, they're going on vacations," Jessica explained. "Coco Chanel was kind of the first one to popularize the tan. And the idea was that she was on a yacht, tanning, because she was so rich." In other words, beauty is a system designed to reinforce hierarchies.. Women are valued most highly in patriarchal societies when they assume the role of the selfless "giver," and giving your time, energy, and money to maintain an appearance that conspicuously signals your willingness to exert effort is rewarded, too. In Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall describes how appearance-based judgments seep beyond the realm of the purely aesthetic for Black women, whose "appearances, speech, and sexuality" are measured against a subjective yardstick of respectability: "Any hint that a Black woman has failed to put effort into her appearance is met with ardent disapproval both inside her community and outside it."
Put another way, guidelines for the ideal physical appearance often map to what most effectively communicates an aesthetic of wealth or status-what's considered "beautiful" is usually just the thing that telegraphs proximity to capital. At the time of this writing, the "Clean Girl," "Quiet Luxury," and "Old Money" aesthetics are making the rounds on TikTok, all of which are animated by the same core principle. Suffice it to say, the connection between beauty and money runs a lot deeper than first meets the eye.
Beauty gets Goop'd
Conversations that openly challenge beauty standards have become more common in the last few years. Women were like, "Wait a second, how come we have to be gorgeous maidens with silken hair while 'dad bod' is the craze sweeping male standards of attractiveness?" As such, the beauty industry has been in the midst of a masterful pivot: repackaging many of the same beautifying wares as-wait for it!-good for you. Enter: the self-care industrial complex. Just when you thought we had this one in the bag.
If you assumed the concept of "self-care" was the product of a Poosh-funded advertising blitz given its cultural dominance in recent years, you may be surprised to learn its roots are far more complex and-crucially-not consumerist. Originally, self-care was rooted in the struggle for survival-it was a medical concept popularized during the civil rights and women's rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, and it was a term that broadly referred to health and community engagement-as in, How can we help our underserved communities access the basic health and social services they need? OG self-care was about activism and strengthening a community's efforts toward equality; Goopified self-care is the commercialized solution for the challenges endemic to our hyperspeed lives, and at the level of individual self-optimization-a philosophy that says you can outrun burnout if you wake up early with this $200 faux-sunrise alarm clock (accompanied by a subscription, obviously) and give heatless curls a spin.
Estimates of the size of the "self-care industry" vary wildly depending on which underlying sectors are included, but in its narrowest definition, it's probably worth around $11 billion in the US. My own contributions to the self-care industry's growth mostly comprised gelatinous under-eye patches, face masks claiming questionable benefits, and too many body scrubs to count, purchases usually fueled by rampant Sunday scaries while meandering through the section of the grocery store that promised to ease my existential dread with something lavender-scented and lush.
On one hand, I'm glad that we're glamorizing (mostly) healthy lifestyle choices as opposed to Euphoria teen MDMA binges. Getting enough sleep, exercising, eating nutritious foods, and being hydrated are good things. But much of the industry deserves a dose of skepticism: If you scratch just a little bit beneath the surface, you notice that many of these products and processes have the (supposedly unintended) side effect of also upholding the conventional feminine beauty standard. Hey, wait a minute-are these just Trojan horses with manicured hooves?
After all, "That Girl" is in control of her life; she's wealthy, healthy, responsible, and gorgeous. When the pace of life is unforgiving, anything that promises a leg up looks like a life raft worth lunging toward. But the center of the Venn diagram between the beauty industry and the wellness industry is the section that says "profit from women's manufactured insecurities." And as with most normative cultural moments directed at women, it's still an implicit directive about who ~we ladies~ should be, and-importantly-how we should use our resources. In some ways, the only difference between commercialized self-care culture and something like the 1950s cult of domesticity (meant to use shiny appliances to lure women back into the kitchen after they got a taste of freedom working outside the home during WWII) is who all these routines and aesthetics claim to benefit. You don't have to have a perfect body or keep a perfect home for your husband anymore-now you get to do it for yourself. And you better like it!
