Sarah E. Hill

Who they are

TCU Magazine described Sarah Hill in its fall 2012 issue as an assistant professor of psychology, in a profile of her lipstick effect research. The profile reports her view that the effect is rooted in female mating psychology, linked to how women's mate preferences prioritise access to resources. It also reports that women primed with news of economic instability showed greater desire for products that enhance attractiveness and less desire for products that do not, and that recession cues raised interest in high-end cosmetics and designer clothing but not in budget-line beauty products.

Those are the facts about the person that this site has verified. Her current position, other research and publication record have not been checked, and none is stated here.

Key papers

Hill, S. E., Rodeheffer, C. D., Griskevicius, V., Durante, K., & White, A. E. (2012). Boosting beauty in an economic decline: Mating, spending, and the lipstick effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(2), 275-291.

The paper opens with 232 months of American unemployment and retail spending data, from January 1992 to April 2011, then reports four experiments on university students, with recession cues delivered as a news article or a slideshow. Recession cues lowered desire for most products and raised women's desire for products that enhance attractiveness to mates. The authors credit the effect to women's desire to attract mates with resources. The paper does not mention Leonard Lauder and says that journalists coined the term, citing a 2001 article.

Key ideas

Recession cues change what women say they want, not only how much: desire for appearance-enhancing products rises while desire for other goods falls. See economic threat priming for the method.

In the paper's third study, the effect was partly carried by women's greater preference for a partner with financial stability.

In the fourth, the effect appeared for luxury beauty products and not for discount ones, and the participant's own social class did not change the result.

The authors state their own limits: the real-world data are correlational, the samples were students, the study concerned women only, and cultural influences were outside its scope.

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