After three years of rocking blonde hair for her role in Wicked, Ariana Grande returns to being brunette in a new Instagram post and the internet spiraled. TikTok theorists came out of their caves and turned on their Amazon ring lights, self proclaimed “Twitter economists” cracked their knuckles and opened their laptops and declared that if pop stars are ditching their difficult-to-maintain blonde hair, we should brace for panic. This begs a serious question, why do we put so much weight on women’s fashion as a macroeconomic data point, and more importantly, what does that say about our society?
The internet’s reaction to Grande’s transformation back to being a brunette is a lot less than a quick gloss treatment and more about how a society in a crisis reads symbols in the smallest things. In times of uncertainty, people look for patterns in the chaos, even if the pattern is Ariana Grande’s low maintenance winter color. Historically, data has shown a correlation between women’ s fashion choices and economic changes, like the Hemline Index, which is a theory that suggests that the length of skirt hems in trend cycles has a direct correlation to stock performance. The shorter the hem, the better the economy is. The same goes for the Lipstick Index, a term coined by Estee Lauder’s chairman Leonard Lauder, which claims that in an economic crisis, consumers are more likely to stray away from bigger purchases like purses or shoes, and invest in luxury cosmetics to emulate financial stability on a smaller scale. You can also think about the platinum blonde boom of the early 2000s and how the recession brought low maintenance brunette back in style. Blonde is infamous for being not only difficult to achieve, but just as challenging to maintain; between hours of sessions dedicated to bleaching, root touch ups, and buying an infinite amount of purple shampoo to prolong its tone. Blonde is not a cheap hair color to have if it is not your natural color. Although going brunette seems like the perfect color for financial hardship, correlation does not equal causation, but it is fun to think so.
What is more significant is this idea that shifts in beauty and culture and the online discourse that follows along with it have become emotional indicators of public anxiety. Gen Z in particular hones in on this phenomena which I call “aesthetic economics,” a framework where any cultural output becomes an emotional currency, and beauty trends quickly become the new New York Stock Exchange. A TikTok microtrend can reflect the volatility of the stock market, and a celebrity breakup suddenly becomes more than gossip. It becomes a cultural weather report and tells us how society is feeling, similarly to a weather report telling us what storm is brewing ahead. This doesn’t mean it’s all unserious, but Gen Z has inherited a world where traditional media landscapes and formal institutions fail to be transparent about instability, so we turn to a cultural landscape and our online presence instead. When trust in economic institutions feels shaky and unstable, people look to find connections as a way to cope. So when Grande goes brunette, it feels less like just a hairstyle, and maybe like a signal that the vibes are way off.Â
Most importantly, the gendered aspect of these indexes and theories should not be ignored. Women’s fashion choices are often barometers, for example, Princess Diana’s revenge dress was seen as a national mood swing as the British public’s trust towards the royal family shifted and Diana represented modern womanhood in light of infidelity. Even take Britney Spears’ 2007 “breakdown” where she shaved her head; people treated it as a mirror of America’s cultural instability post 9/11, and in the midst of the Iraq War. These examples of women in the media used as a way to measure cultural climate shows that they are not even allowed to exist in the spotlight. A slight change of hair, behavior, or relationship status can sway the narrative that women are examples of a broader cultural change, when in reality they are just choices. Women should not have to be hyper-analyzed to satisfy cultural curiosity.Â
Ultimately, Ariana Grande picking up her phone and calling her hairstylist for an appointment is not a sign that we should be stocking up on canned beans. Grande being in her brunette era has little to tell us about what is going on with the economy, and more about what is going on in our society. In a world where beauty equals data and fandoms become the unofficial analysts, the line between seriousness and online satire becomes increasingly blurry. This just proves that when instability is our reality, we turn to patterns and familiarity, like memes and celebrity gossip. Ariana Grande is not predicting a recession, the people are…. and she just happened to be in the salon when it happened.