Dress for success: does primping pay?

Abstract

Combining labor-market information, appraisals of respondents' beauty, and household expenditures allows us to examine within a unified framework the relative magnitudes of investment and consumption components in one activity, women's spending on beauty-enhancing goods and services. We find that beauty raises women's earnings adjusted for a wide range of controls. Additional spending on clothing and cosmetics has a generally positive marginal impact on a woman's perceived beauty. The relative sizes of these effects demonstrate that such purchases pay back no more than 15% of additional unit of expenditure in the form of higher earnings. Most such spending seems to represent consumption.