The “magic lipstick”: luxury values in an economic downturn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to investigate how consumers understood luxury during an economic downturn and the values they gained from consuming luxury in a downturn and to refine the existing dimensions of the luxury value framework. Design/methodology/approach This study was qualitative and interpretive in nature. The authors interviewed 16 female luxury consumers during the 2022–2024 economic downturn in the UK and thematically analysed the data. Findings The term “lipstick effect” refers to increased consumption of certain affordable luxuries, such as premium lipsticks, in downturns. The authors found this imprecise, as the respondents consumed affordable luxuries that were not cosmetics. Apart from escapism offered by luxury consumption, participants were ensuring luxury’s durability and continued functional value, which they tied to their self-concept as responsible consumers. Luxury was also consumed to improve well-being, but this generated negative emotions of guilt and shame; some consumers were concealing luxury. Originality/value The authors contributed to a better understanding of the construct of luxury values. The authors added durability and well-being as new luxury values, mapped to functional and symbolic value dimensions, respectively. The authors also added the principle of making links between different luxury values and added the links between durability (functional) and self-actualization (symbolic) and between social meaning (symbolic) and emotional value (experiential). Further, the authors advise marketers to prioritize “meaning” and “doing” over “owning” luxury and to enhance the visibility of durability signals of luxury over its conspicuousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".