Tightened budgets and uncertain futures have proven incompatible with our beauty status quo. This pandemic, our work and social lives disintegrated, as did our reasons for wearing makeup. Instead, we found ourselves only with empty, feminist questions. Like what’s the point of getting made up if there’s nobody to see or impress? Or whether it’s sad or empowering to wear makeup underneath our face masks if the only place we go is the grocery store?

In unexceptional times, we balance the superfluous expenses haphazardly with our costs of survival. But pandemics and economic downturns are odd times. As we reevaluate how our beauty routines fit into our lives, we also reconfigure where our beauty purchases lie in our budget. We downgrade brands, cut out a few steps to our skincare routine, or decide that no-makeup was the path of enlightenment all along. Recently, however, another option to afford our lipstick and eat it too has arrived for the budget-conscious beauty – alternative financing arrangements that have slowly immersed themselves into the beauty ecommerce experience. 

Unlike many collaborations in the industry, two particular financing partnerships arrived with little fanfare. Retail giant Sephora and clean beauty mainstay Credo joined hands with Klarna and Afterpay, respectively, to debut a new way to buy beauty: interest-free installments. Klarna markets the financing scheme “a better way to shop.” 

The concept is simple. Rather than facing the pain of purchasing a $160 day cream upfront, we can now pay $40 with additional $40 payments biweekly in three installments. Suddenly, prestige beauty seems affordable. The rise of installment financing marks a strange new phase for the industry – one that situates beauty somewhere between cars, laundry machines, and iPhones and reinforces the industry’s role as necessity, rather than luxury. 

Culturally, we’ve long arrived at the conviction that makeup is a strong suggestion (if not requirement) for our social and work lives. Even when we’re at home, skincare and self-care are intertwined, embodiments of the well-balanced lifestyle. Physical attractiveness itself tops the list of society’s most valued traits in women with beauty reigning alongside fashion and fitness in an ecosystem of industries devoted to the pursuit of our aesthetic selves. 

By fronting down payments and promising continued installments on our beauty products much in the same way we do for our homes and cars, we are signaling that we consider beauty important enough to warrant the sacrifice of future earned income. The biweekly timing of payments through Klarna and Afterpay coincides with the average pay period – we pay with the paychecks we have yet to receive. Yet the temptation of “interest-free” belies a dangerous financial attitude that blurs what we think we need and what we should enter into debt for. Beauty, as socially and culturally necessary as it has come to be, is not worth our indebtedness. Especially not during the down times. 

In the good versus bad debt dichotomy of personal finance, certain debts that enable long-term income gain, such as professional graduate programs, or value appreciation, such as real estate, are encouraged. Purchases that quickly lose value should be forgone. Beauty is a tempting example of bad debt, and for the beauty products we absolutely must have, it makes more financial sense to budget for brands we can afford at face value instead of opting for interest-free payments. 

At their heart, the financing partnerships represent the industry’s attempt to meet lower customer price points, albeit by encouraging customers themselves to incur debt. As the coronavirus unemployment count surpasses 40 million however, the customers whom retailers courted for their post-purchase payment programs now run the risk of defaulting. Beauty will not be their highest priority bill. Despite the problematic short term prospects of installment financing for both customers and retailers, the partnerships illuminate an opportunity for brands to develop quality products at less-than-prestige prices. In the meantime, we’ll continue to admire our wishlists and wistfully daydream of the high-end products currently out of financial reach.