Is This Beauty Trend a Recession Indicator...or a Sign That the Cost of Womanhood is too High?

In 2024, influencer Valeria Lipovetsky shared that her life quality improved drastically when she stopped getting her nails regularly.

Recently, finance guru Vivian Tu shouted out this video, saying she’s also ditching the manicure habit. For her, the value it brings to her life isn’t worth the monetary value…so she’s forgoing frequent manis in favor of only getting her nails done ahead of special events.

Lipovetsy’s original video is older, but in the past few months, I’ve been seeing a lot of people suddenly start breaking their regular nail appointment streak, opting instead for clean, natural nails. This feels a little ironic: We’ve moved past the clean girl aesthetic and have started embracing something a bit more effort-forward on a larger scale in the fashion and beauty world.

Yet counterintuitively, natural “clean girl” nails are coming back. Plenty of people are also theorizing that this isn’t just a beauty trend, but a recession indicator.

For the past year, people have been theorizing that the shift many women are taking towards natural nail styles is a sign that people are tightening up their spending in preparation for the economic downturn. That’s nothing new, but we need to talk about just how high-maintenance and costly the standards of womanhood are — because nobody is really taking the conversation there. 

It almost feels like we have to give each permission to change these standards. Like it’s not enough to say “this doesn’t feel worth it to me”, it has to be something other women are all feeling and saying on a large scale.

Now, people are saying that forgoing getting your nails done is okay. It’s becoming trendy. But what about the long-held standard that women always have groomed nails? And groomed hair? And makeup done? And clothes that fit that ever-changing trend cycle? And botox and skincare and hair dye to cover up grays, and all the other things? 

This is the point here, IMO — not the acceptance of natural nails or the potential recession indicator of it all. Women are held to such high standards for how they groom themselves, and this isn’t just expensive. It’s also a lot of time, a lot of work, and a lot to manage. And the thing is, it always has been. And no matter what the trend cycle dictates, it probably always will be.