In 2024, Brazil will become the third largest beauty and personal care market in the world, with US$37.4 billion in sales, behind only the United States and China, according to Euromonitor. The number also describes a pattern of behavior in which millions of individual decisions have transformed the appearance of one of the largest markets in the country. This movement cannot be explained solely by social networks or marketing; There is also an economic component: the perception that good appearance generates gains, including in the job market.
In practice, it works as an initial filter for access to opportunities. In a field experiment carried out in Spain in 2023, Catarina Goulão, Juan Antonio Lacomba, Francisco Lagos and Dan-Olof Rooth sent 3,155 fictitious CVs for vacancies in 12 occupations, keeping education and experience constant and only varying digitally edited photos. Male candidates visually associated with being overweight received 26% fewer interview invitations, an effect that reached 46% in occupations dominated by women.
The mechanism was not the weight itself, but the drop in perceived attractiveness. Among women, there was a penalty in sectors dominated by men and, in some sectors predominantly occupied by women, more responses for these profiles.
Similar results appear in another context: in China, Weiguang Deng, Dayang Li and Dong Zhou sent 4,946 pairs of identical resumes for vacancies in the financial sector in five large urban centers, varying only in facial attractiveness. Candidates considered more attractive received an interview invitation 5.6 percentage points more often than profiles with average appearance. The beauty bonus was higher in large cities, companies listed on the stock exchange and higher-paying jobs. Higher education reduced some of the bias for men but not for women, suggesting that formal credentials attenuate but do not neutralize visual judgments.
This pattern helps you understand why no is just symbolic. When relevant decisions systematically incorporate visual shortcuts, individuals begin to treat appearance as an asset. The so-called halo effect describes the tendency to infer competence or trustworthiness from physical attributes. In environments with little time and an excess of information, this shortcut becomes the norm.
The mechanism also adds an extra layer of inequality, after all, those with more income more easily access products, treatments and services associated with valued standards. In countries like Brazil, where aesthetics intersect with racial and class markers, this process tends to reproduce existing hierarchies.
The expectation of a return exists, but the costs are rarely included, as for years, hair straightening with formaldehyde and glyoxylic acid, later banned due to health risks, was widely used in the name of aesthetic adequacy. The potential gain was perceived, but the physical damage and accumulated risk were underestimated.
There are advances in , but the evidence still indicates that the differential associated with attractiveness persists, especially in more competitive markets. Thus, if on the one hand pretending that appearance doesn’t matter produces naivety, on the other hand, organizing personal decisions exclusively based on it tends to generate expensive and physically exhausting trajectories.
Therefore, understanding these biases is fundamental, as it allows for less automatic decisions that are less captured by promises that, in general, do not make their costs explicit. And as the Brazilian beauty market grows precisely because it responds to real incentives, while this scenario does not change, the challenge becomes making more conscious decisions about appearance and health
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