When did being hot become a job requirement?
On looksmaxxing, the beauty premium, and spending your way to employability
Alicia here! I’m excited to feature this guest essay from friend of The Purse Hanna Horvath (no, not that one), a certified financial planner, financial editor, and money psychology expert. I spoke to Hanna a few weeks ago for my essay on sports betting and prediction markets, and I was eager to give her the space to explore another money issue.
Hanna is one of my favorite follows here (she writes the Your Brain on Money newsletter) and on TikTok; she’s gifted at putting into words what we’re all feeling about money at the moment, and connecting it to larger trends and forces. Below she addresses some things I (and many of my friends) have been becoming increasingly anxious about in the age of Ozempic.
I turn 30 this year, and I’ve been looking at myself more than I used to—in a critical, assessing way. Scanning my face for what’s changed, what’s slipping, what might need intervention. My career is built around financial advice, but I post my face online to give that advice. Increasingly, I find myself wondering how much of that career is tied to how I look.
This feels embarrassing to admit. I’m not supposed to be a person who spirals about whether I need under-eye filler. But I keep finding myself fixated on the idea that my credibility as a writer, as an expert, is somehow wrapped up in my appearance.
The “beauty premium” is well-documented: Conventionally attractive people tend to earn more. But something has shifted in how we’re responding to it.
Economic precarity has a way of making you want to optimize whatever you can control. And we’ve had plenty of instability.
The job market has been frozen for months. Layoffs keep coming. People are clinging to roles they’d normally leave because there’s nowhere to go. If you’re older, the picture is grimmer—nearly two-thirds of workers 50 and older report experiencing age discrimination at work.
You can’t control whether your company has layoffs. You can’t control the interest rates and inflation that make homeownership feel impossible. You can’t control the algorithm that decides whether your résumé gets seen.
But you can control whether you look “put together.” You can control whether you appear energetic, youthful, alert. In a world of uncertainty, your face becomes an investable asset.
This is how we end up framing Botox as career development. The logic is that if I look better, I’ll be perceived as more competent, and I’ll make more money, so this cosmetic procedure will pay for itself. Bustle captured it perfectly in a recent headline: “I Can’t Afford A House, So Why Don’t I Just Be Gorgeous?”
The tools for pursuing this have exploded. Botox usage nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024. The “tweakments” industry—minor procedures positioned as routine maintenance—has boomed. Social media offers us filters that show us “better” versions of our faces, then offers us ads for the procedures to make the filter permanent.
Celebrity culture has also normalized this. We watch faces and bodies transform in real time, then watch the transformations get reframed as wellness rather than cosmetic intervention. Now it’s not vanity—it’s self-care. It’s investing in yourself.
Katie Gatti Tassin calls this the “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel.” The gym membership, the skincare routine, the hair appointments, the nails, the lashes, the brows, the clothes, the makeup. All of it is presented as a choice, but it increasingly feels required as career insurance.
And today, the tools for achieving conventional beauty have never been more accessible. GLP-1 drugs are getting cheaper. Cosmetic procedures that once cost thousands now come with much smaller price tags.
But the flip side of that accessibility is expectation. When everyone can optimize, the pressure to do so quietly becomes mandatory. Looking “put together” stops being a nice-to-have and starts feeling like table stakes.
Status markers often lose their heft once everyone can access them. If conventional beauty becomes attainable for most people, does the premium disappear? Or does the goalpost simply move—toward more extreme interventions, more subtle markers, some new form of distinction that separates those with resources from those without?
I suspect it’s the latter. The beauty premium, in many ways, is about hierarchy—signaling that you have the time, money, and self-discipline to optimize. The hamster wheel keeps spinning.
And we’ll keep trying to keep up, because in an economy that offers so little security, the desire to control something is almost impossible to resist.
- Hanna Horvath
Corporate looksmaxxing in the news
A recent Business Insider article “Being hot is now a job requirement” explores how GLP-1s, Botox, and looksmaxxing have shifted conventional beauty from aspiration to expectation in the corporate world—and why workers in a brutal job market are treating their appearance as career insurance.
In a follow-up, Business Insider reports on the rise of workplace plastic surgery, examining what it means when cosmetic procedures become just another personal development expense.
Hannah Orenstein’s piece in Bustle on how women are pivoting to little luxuries over long-term goals captures a generational mood: When you can’t afford a house, you might as well spend more to be gorgeous. It’s a sharp look at how beauty spending has become almost a coping mechanism for economic disappointment.
This anti-cosmetic-surgery essay is a deliberately confrontational take on how the beauty industry profits from manufactured insecurity—and why the author thinks women have a responsibility to talk about it, even when it’s uncomfortable.
In 2024, Atlantic staff writer Yasmin Tayag examined the rise of “baby Botox” and the new anti-aging skincare culture, tracing how preventative treatments have become normalized for people in their twenties and thirties.
If you want to know where the money actually goes, The Wall Street Journal published Katie Gatti Tassin’s personal accounting of her beauty expenses.
Tressie McMillan Cottom often writes about how race plays into our perceptions of beauty and what is “appropriate,” including in work settings.
Hanna’s newsletter Your Brain on Money ran a piece this week about “maxxing” culture more broadly—what happens when we turn every aspect of ourselves into a project to be optimized.
In 2024, Lindsey wrote about whether she should get Botox for her 44th birthday. (Spoiler alert: She did not.)
What else we’re talking about
I’m reading Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, and it’s essential for anyone who’s ever wondered why American cities look the way they do. The book traces how a century of car-centric planning promised freedom but instead demolished neighborhoods and created an epidemic of traffic deaths and social isolation. It’s a damning indictment and a hopeful roadmap for what a better future could look like. As a committed urbanist (I live in NYC and don’t own a car), this is my catnip. -Hanna
It’s been depressing to watch what’s been happening with ICE in Minnesota and feeling like we have no control or way of truly helping. I’ve long been a fan of the indie secondhand retailer NOIHSAF, which is based in Minnesota. I first learned of the statewide economic blackout from its newsletter. NOIHSAF is disabling its checkout today, January 23, and also provided a list of mutual aid groups that are looking for donations. Here is another good list. -Lindsey
Industry is back, and it’s such a rich text if you enjoy analyzing TV shows, which I do. (I do not subscribe to the “the curtains are just blue” mentality.) I never miss Telling the Bee’s commentary on the show (or many others) on Substack and TikTok. He has such a refreshing and thoughtful outlook, even when I don’t agree with him 100%. -Alicia
Mitski’s new song “Where’s My Phone?” dropped, and I’ve had it on repeat. Nobody captures the specific melancholy of contemporary existence quite like her! -Hanna
This New York Times roundup of stories of people sharing how much their health care premiums are going up now that the Affordable Care Act subsidies have expired is deeply depressing. -Lindsey
It feels like I’m grasping for straws trying to find good news these days, but I was delighted to see that Sinners is now the most Oscar nominated movie of all time. -Lindsey (Alicia co-signs!)
On our radar
I was recently quoted in The New York Times about congestion pricing and the financial psychology of how we think about transportation costs. Urbanist Hanna has entered the chat! -Hanna
If you want more of my takes on financial psychology, I’ve been doing a lot on TikTok lately (@yourbrainonmoney)—including a video on the Bustle piece. - Hanna
The Purse is announcing some big news next week! Stay tuned! -Alicia and Lindsey
Stat of the week
Comment of the week
“I really saw myself in this post. As a single, queer, not dating anyone seriously person, I related to the struggles of not splitting bills and not having that extra set of hands so to speak. It also made me feel less alone with how I’m choosing to save, spend money, and have [credit card] debt that just sort of accumulated out of nowhere.” -Kalei Libby on Home Economics No. 44: Single, 34, and living on $150,000.
Best money we spent last week
A flight to New Zealand for $1,050. I am flying (quite far!) to visit a friend—and, as a huge Lord of the Rings fan, to see the Shire. Travel and new experiences are something I actively prioritize in my budget. I’m a big believer in values-based spending, and “adventures with people I love” is at the top of my list. So I save up for stuff like this and don’t feel guilty about it. -Hanna
Alicia and I have been working hard lately, and it’s been tough to build in breaks. But last Friday, I went to a “dancing to the oldies”-type exercise class with my friend Issy at the new workout studio near my apartment. It was so fun and silly and such a good break for my brain. I want to become a regular! ($20) -Lindsey
I’ve spent a little too much money lately, so my goal for the next month or so is to rein it back in. But this week, I took my sister out for dinner as a belated birthday gift, and it happened to be Restaurant Week, so the price was a little better than usual (at $60 each for a three-course prix fixe menu—still not cheap!). The best part of the meal was the cappuccino with dessert ($5). -Alicia
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While it may be increasing, this is an old and worn cudgel, used mostly (though not entirely) against women in the workforce. As a 63-year-old woman who came up in Silicon Valley, by the time I was in my 40s I could feel myself written off as “kind of used up,” despite having been very successful in my late 20s and 30s. I had pushed against the grain for years-in how I dressed, how I worked, and how I questioned norms (my first hybrid job was in 1995, and I was the first in my large corporation). Those traits were seen as smart, even visionary, when I was younger. As I aged, the same behavior was increasingly seen as being difficult or a nag. I spent several years struggling to find work that felt aligned, before finally changing course and starting my own organization. It is the only security you can have. I would rather fail on my own than struggle to operate with blowhards that use their dick and their low self esteem to make decisions.
I talk a lot about being unemployable at my age, but it’s not just my age: It’s my failure to attempt to look younger.
I’m keenly aware that being competent and reliable are not enough. Talent and hard work are not enough, either.
Could I have found a job if I were more attractive and willing (and able!) to have work done or at least to have spent more on my appearance?
Probably. I meet traditional grooming standards — feel free to look at my profile pic and tell me if you think I’m wrong — but I don’t meet the higher standards demanded of women today — and ONLY women, mind you!