The Finishable Change

There is a look that keeps turning up wherever money is tight: phone cases covered in rhinestones, nails that take two hours, cakes piped like rococo ceilings, small objects decorated far past their use. Nobody has measured it properly, so take it as observation. The usual explanations are moods. In a recession people supposedly buy small comforts, the lipstick effect, or shop to feel in control.

The research supports something narrower and more useful. Decoration in a downturn looks less like a mood than like a budget decision. When a big goal such as a home moves out of reach, saving for it stops paying off, and money moves to changes small enough to finish now, or to long shots. Ornament is the kind of change you can finish. I covered the other half of the ornament story, what decoration proves once machines can draw it, in The Margin of Crudeness; this note is about who buys it, and when.

The lipstick effect, checked

The idea that small luxuries sell better in hard times has a real experimental base. Sarah Hill and colleagues found that reminders of a recession raised women’s interest in products that enhance appearance. Their own follow-up undercut the cheap-treat reading: the effect was for products that worked, not for inexpensive indulgences in general, and the authors concluded it was unlikely to be a shift from expensive comforts to cheap ones (Hill et al. 2012). Ekaterina Netchaeva and McKenzie Rees then found that women worried about the economy chose to improve their professional appearance more often than their romantic appeal (Netchaeva and Rees 2016). The motive was work.

Household data adds the budget. Daniel MacDonald and Yasemin Dildar found a significant rise in cosmetics spending among women aged 18 to 40 during the Great Recession. It happened whether or not they were married or employed, which counts against the mate-seeking and job-seeking explanations, and it came from a substitution away from spending on clothes (MacDonald and Dildar 2020). Money moved down the price ladder inside the same category: the visible, presentable self.

The psychology usually cited, and its record

Two older ideas get invoked to explain the decorated object. Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky found that feeling powerless raised what people would pay for status goods, but only for products that signaled status (Rucker and Galinsky 2008). Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer’s symbolic self-completion theory says that people who lack the real markers of an identity reach for substitute symbols of it (Wicklund and Gollwitzer 1981).

Both describe the feeling well. The experimental record around them is weaker than their fame. A sibling paper in the power-and-status line was retracted in 2023 (Retraction notice), and a preregistered replication of its central effect failed (Tunca et al. 2022); the 2008 paper itself has no notice attached. The manipulation used to make people feel a loss of control, behind several studies on what we buy when we feel helpless, failed a registered replication across two countries (Hoogeveen et al. 2018). And when twenty studies of scarcity priming were replicated, the authors concluded that “scarcity primes have a minimal influence on cognitive ability, product attitudes, or well being,” while feeling poor may still shape financial decisions (O’Donnell et al. 2021). Lab moods are a shaky foundation. Budgets are better documented.

The giving-up threshold

A new working paper by Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo follows renters through card and account data as their county becomes unaffordable to buy in. The poorest fifth increase their total spending by 3.03%, while the richest fifth cut it by 3.96%, and the change declines steadily across the income range. Spending on leisure follows the same pattern. Willingness to take investment risk moves differently: it rises in the middle fifths and falls at both ends (Lee and Yoo 2025).

When renting households are priced out, by income

Change in total spending

1. Lowest fifth+3.03%
2. Second+1.20%
3. Middle+0.28%
4. Fourth−1.20%
5. Highest fifth−3.96%

Change in taking investment risk, in points

1. Lowest fifth−0.22
2. Second+0.11
3. Middle+0.20
4. Fourth+0.17
5. Highest fifth−0.36

The authors explain it with a threshold they call the giving-up threshold. Renters who can still reach ownership save and avoid risk. Those far below it stop saving for a goal that saving can’t reach, and spend; those in between, in the authors’ phrase, show a “gambling for redemption” motive, taking risk as a last resort to close the gap. The effects on risk are small, fractions of a percentage point on a base of about 11%, and the paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed. What it adds is a mechanism with numbers: one threshold that produces both the decorative response and the speculative one.

Read through that lens, the bedazzled phone case and the long-shot bet sit on the same side of the same line. Both buy something a deposit can’t buy anymore. The case is a transformation you can finish this week, and the bet is a small chance at the big one.

The milestone, measured honestly

The blocked-milestone story is often told about a whole generation, and the data is more local than that. Eurostat’s estimate of the average age at which young Europeans leave the parental home barely moved across the EU, from 26.5 in 2010 to 26.3 in 2025. In Spain it rose from 28.4 to 30.2. In Romania it fell, from 28.2 to 27.4 (Eurostat 2026). The threshold sits wherever prices sit, so the decorative turn should be strongest where homes have moved furthest out of reach, not everywhere at once.

At the desk

For brands, the useful reading is about what a purchase completes. People on the giving-up side of the threshold aren’t buying a step toward the big goal, so a small luxury sold as “progress toward” something misreads them. What sells is completion: a change they can finish and see, a kit, a refill, a personal edit. The loud version has a known profile. Young Jee Han, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze found that consumers with a high need for status who can’t afford the real luxury good tend to choose louder, more prominently branded versions, counterfeits included (Han et al. 2010). Loud decoration is often a signal from a constrained budget, which is a reason to design for it with respect, not to mock it.

The same threshold applies to crypto, where the speculative response is visible. Lee and Yoo’s numbers are small and concentrated in the middle of the income range, so they describe a structure, not a portrait of anyone holding a token.

How this could be wrong

The paper at the center of this note is an unreviewed working paper using observational data, and renters may differ from owners in ways it can’t fully control; the authors themselves offer a second explanation, that mortgages act as forced saving. The decorative trend has no measurement at all. Hill’s experiments used small student samples, and I found no independent replication. If a well-designed study found that economic threat raises spending on ornament directly, with no budget mechanism needed, the mood explanation would be back.

References

1. Hill, Sarah E., et al. "Boosting Beauty in an Economic Decline: Mating, Spending, and the Lipstick Effect." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 2 (2012): 275–291. · doi:10.1037/a0028657
2. Netchaeva, Ekaterina, and McKenzie Rees. "Strategically Stunning: The Professional Motivations Behind the Lipstick Effect." Psychological Science 27, no. 8 (2016): 1157–1168. · doi:10.1177/0956797616654677
3. MacDonald, Daniel, and Yasemin Dildar. "Social and Psychological Determinants of Consumption: Evidence for the Lipstick Effect during the Great Recession." Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 86 (2020): 101527. · doi:10.1016/j.socec.2020.101527
4. Rucker, Derek D., and Adam D. Galinsky. "Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption." Journal of Consumer Research 35, no. 2 (2008): 257–267. · doi:10.1086/588569
5. Wicklund, Robert A., and Peter M. Gollwitzer. "Symbolic Self-Completion, Attempted Influence, and Self-Deprecation." Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2, no. 2 (1981): 89–114. · doi:10.1207/s15324834basp0202_2
6. "Retraction of: Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status." Journal of Consumer Research (2023). · doi:10.1093/jcr/ucad055
7. Tunca, Burak, Ignazio Ziano, and Xu Wenting. "Super-Size Me: An Unsuccessful Preregistered Replication of the Effect of Product Size on Status Signaling." Meta-Psychology 6 (2022). · doi:10.15626/MP.2020.2538
8. Hoogeveen, Suzanne, et al. "Compensatory Control and Religious Beliefs: A Registered Replication Report across Two Countries." Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology 3, no. 3 (2018): 240–265. · doi:10.1080/23743603.2019.1684821
9. O'Donnell, Michael, et al. "Empirical Audit and Review and an Assessment of Evidentiary Value in Research on the Psychological Consequences of Scarcity." PNAS 118, no. 44 (2021): e2103313118. · doi:10.1073/pnas.2103313118
10. Lee, Seung Hyeong, and Younggeun Yoo. "'Giving Up': The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment." SSRN working paper (2025). · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5770722
11. Eurostat. "Estimated Average Age of Young People Leaving the Parental Household by Sex" (dataset yth_demo_030). Updated April 2026.
12. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74, no. 4 (2010): 15–30. · doi:10.1509/jmkg.74.4.015
13. Vaduvescu, Claudia. "The Margin of Crudeness: Ornament After Intricacy Became Free." claudiavaduvescu.com, 2026.