How to spend Make cents – and sense – of buying your fave beauty products
The beauty industry wants to make you feel good – after you pay up. The industry’s never been bigger, with more entrants auditioning for your paycheque each day. Here’s how to make cents – and sense – of it all.
It’s never felt easier to shop. That’s because the digital universe has never known us so well. The [whatever thing] we love? It follows us anywhere we’re connected. It follows us on a train. It follows us on a plane. It follows us here and there. It follows us everywhere. It’s as though Dr Seuss has assumed our collective shopping psyche. The products of our dreams are on our phones, in our ears and flashing on our TV screens. We’re introduced to sleep masks that promise to fight the fearsome sun and bring us rest, followed by weighted blankets that will cut therapy bills in half. Products
that know you want them before you do. And every scroll floods us with personal endorsements: our friends’ (both real and the social media kind) bathtub selfies, their bathroom cupboards and dressing tables, staged and styled with lipsticks, perfumes and soaks that are one click away. The mysteries of beauty routines are mysterious no more. And it’s all for sale, sale, sale! But collecting can’t really be the endgame of beauty consumption: this stuff has a shelf life. And we only have so much surface area – on our bodies and shelves – to begin with. Having an Instagrammable bathroom cupboard stocked with gorgeous little French bottles (and, curiously, no medicine at all) is thrilling. There’s no denying that. But is it as thrilling as finding the one product that does that one thing and just makes you feel – understood? We venture no. Not even close. Researchers have found that the joy of anticipating an experience is often greater than the joy of the experience itself (check out ‘If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right’ in the Journal of Consumer Psychology). It’s not the buying, but the deliberating, doing the homework, and then finally, finally, taking the leap and acquiring just the right thing. And one that you can afford. Debt and money insecurity can last longer than even the most shelf-stable creams. Which is why it’s also important to remember that beauty’s so much more than products and physical appearance. It’s a way of seeing the world, of connecting with others, of presenting the self you want to be and accepting the self you are. And that means padding and protecting (or opening) a savings account and, if it interests you, treating yourself every so often to affordable beauty indulgences. Did you hear the ‘affordable’ part? Because despite what you may have heard from people selling beauty products, a face cream is never an ‘investment’. It depreciates as soon as you break that seal. So isn’t it nice to know that it’s not the face cream that really matters, anyway? It’s the time before that: the shopping, not the buying. And that, dear friends, is free. Thrifting, but for beauty products. What could go wrong? The concept is undeniably budget- and planet-friendly. But unlike vintage Levi’s, makeup doesn’t get better with time. More importantly: “Alcohol and makeup cleansers aren’t necessarily enough to kill the viruses and bacteria that’ve been growing on and contaminating [used] makeup,” says dermatologist Shari Marchbein (and a wash cycle’s out of the question.) Still, it’s a thing: secondhand goods will probably comprise 10% of the retail market five years from now, and buying used makeup has gone nearly mainstream among millennials in Japan. Beauty Squad SA’S the biggest Facebook beauty community in South Africa. On their platform, they share advice, uncensored reviews, and tip and tricks on all things beauty. If you’ve bought a branded product at a shop that doesn’t match your skin or isn’t suitable for you, and you aren’t able to take it back, you can sterilise the product and send Beauty Squad SA proof of its authenticity. Then, you can post it on the group for other people to buy. The group has over 45 000 members and hosts The Beauty Squad SA Expo annually in Cape Town. You can subscribe to a beauty box for R450, filled with +/-R1 000-worth of beauty products.
the best spending advice from above, and setting a budget by the stars
With financial astrology, we take a look at what the economy does, how markets perform, and how this can be applied in business situations – anything that involves money, whether that’s personal investments, trading, or making business decisions for a profit. Most recently, I’ve had a lot of women ask me about purchasing real estate. They’ve asked if it’s a good time to buy. I expect prices to fall in 2020. At the same time, we’re in a peaking period for residential real estate,
“It’s the time before that: the shopping, not the buying. and that, dear friends, Is free”
astrologically, based on how the moon’s nodes move through the signs. At the very least, go into any real-estate transaction with the understanding that you’d better love this place because you may not be able to get out at a profit for a while. From men, what I mostly get is “Which markets are the best ones for me to trade in?” Finding markets that you’re suited to isn’t unlike thinking about how you find a mate. Investors and traders are typically drawn to markets in which both sun signs match, both moon signs match or a combination of the two. I had one client who’d always liked to trade soybeans and silver and asked to see if those were good markets for him. Silver began trading in 1931, in New York, and soybeans in 1936, in Chicago. Yet each market’s moon was within two degrees of each other, and my client’s natal Venus (money) and Mercury (trading) were at 16 Gemini and 15 Gemini, respectively. That blew me away. His interest in trading to make money drew him to two markets started years apart, in different cities that had similar moon positions, and were in tight conjunction with his own Venus and Mercury. I made a joke with a friend. When she looks at Venus, she sees love; when I look at Venus, I see money.