Jewellery (jewelry)

By Molly Prior In gloomy periods gone by, shoppers continued to seek out little luxuries: a lipstick instead of a designer handbag, or a fragrance in lieu of a gown.

This time around, practicality has set in, as consumers begrudgingly absorb the ballooning costs of energy and food prices.

“Beauty is the last sacred cow to go,” said Goldsmith & Harris analyst Gary Giblen, adding that this downturn also has dented sales of children’s goods, pet care and food ? categories usually seen as recession-proof.

Industry experts polled said it may be too early to tell whether consumers are curbing beauty spending, but collectively their comments and data underline the reality that the environment is just plain tough.”We don?t expect any relief for consumers or the industry until the second quarter of 2009.”? Sheila McCusker, IRI Times & TrendsTraffic has thinned in department stores and in tony beach towns, like East Hampton, N.Y., observed Allan Mottus, an industry consultant. “It’s not a good sign for the economy.” In past downturns, people always seemed to scrape up enough extra cash to splurge on a lipstick. “This downturn is different,” said Mottus.

Wendy Liebmann’s firm WSL Strategic Retail polls shoppers every six months on their confidence levels and what categories they are buying and which they are cutting back on. The most recent study reveals that 65 percent of the 1,500 shoppers surveyed in May said they pulled back spending across the board, compared with 43 percent in the year-earlier period.

“Now it’s as if we got into the last level of cuts,” said Liebmann, co-founder and chief executive officer of WSL, adding that in addition to cosmetics consumers also are reining in purchases of hair care and skin care.

WSL’s findings indicate that 59 percent of women cut spending on cosmetics, compared with 55 percent in the year-ago period; 55 percent lessened skin care purchases, compared with 32 percent the prior year, and 51 percent trimmed hair care spending compared with 32 percent. To compensate, WSL found shoppers are trading down to less-expensive brands and stores, using less and finishing products before buying replacements.

Sheila McCusker, editor of IRI Times & Trends, published by the Chicago-based market research firm Information Resources Inc., declared, “We view this time as an economic transformation.”