The other day when in Valletta I noticed that just one shop was really buzzing. There were so many people in there I thought they had a big sale on – something like 90 per cent discount – but they hadn’t. I went inside. It’s a shop that sells cheap and cheerful fashion jewellery.

This shop, on the main street, has been there for a couple of years, but I have never seen it so full. I had to fight my way inside. When I turned round, some woman got an eyeful of my shoulder-bag and let rip. People were riffling through the racks with that recognisable determination that says “I’m going to buy something if it kills me.” The body language is very different to that of people who are “just looking” or browsing out of boredom or curiosity.

All the other shops were empty, or entertaining a couple of people who were “just looking”. I walked further down the main street, and found another shop that was packed with frenzied women, all jostling each other and rifling through the stands. And what do you know? It sold really hip fashion jewellery, too.

This made me think. When women are under pressure, they go shopping to cheer themselves up. When we are under great financial pressure, we still want to buy something to lift our spirits, but our budget has shrunk to a fraction of what it was – or we feel guilty about splashing out, even if we can still afford to do so. So what we do is this: we buy inexpensive treats. To be defined as a treat, the thing must be entirely frivolous and unnecessary. It must speak of fun, dressing up, or luxury. So we buy ourselves cheap but gorgeous earrings, or a bit of make-up.

Then I remembered the term “lipstick effect”. Leonard Lauder, son of Estee Lauder, she of the eponymous cosmetics giant, had coined it to describe the effect that bad times have on lipstick sales. When the going gets rough, lipstick sales soar. “When lipstick sales go up, people don’t want to buy dresses,” he said in 2001. “When things get tough, women buy lipstick.” The more expensive the lipstick, the higher the sales increase. The psychology behind it is this. A woman wants to treat herself to something special, to shift a bit of the gloom. What’s the most luxurious thing she can get for €20? It’s a lipstick from Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent. A lipstick from one of the low-end brands isn’t a treat. It’s a necessity, and if you buy it when you’re feeling low, that €5 lipstick can shove you even further down.

The phenomenon noted by Leonard Lauder isn’t new. In the Second World War, women famously cheered themselves up with lipstick and nylons – when they could get hold of them. The cosmetics company Tangee promoted lipstick as a product that would help women “put on a brave face”, or so the advertisements said. In times of deprivation, whether real or self-imposed, the little treats become the big ones. And they are invariably linked with femininity. Scent is a treat. A coffee-grinder is not, even if we love coffee and need a new one. Most men do not understand this, but every woman will know exactly what I mean.

Now I read in The Financial Times that Leonard Lauder has revised his lipstick effect theory. Now it’s the foundation effect. Foundation, for the men who are reading this, is that skin-coloured cream that women rub into their faces to achieve an even complexion. In Malta, it’s often called make-up – but make-up means all the magic tricks we use on our face: mascara, powder, blusher, the lot, and not just foundation. For some reason that I might understand one day, even peachy-skinned teenagers are using foundation. This seems to me extraordinary, for I have always had a deep horror of the stuff and have used it only once, on my wedding day. I had to fight down the urge to rush to the nearest tap and scrub it off.

But I am unusual in this. Apparently, foundation is now the top-ranking make-up product of all time, pipping even lipstick to the post. In Britain, where women really love their foundation, sales of the product rose by 15 per cent last year, against 2.5 per cent for lipstick. Sales figures from the United States indicate a similar trend. Lipstick remains the most popular item of make-up only among the over-60s.

Well, that explains the strange look of a lot of women I see: the combination of foundation and natural lips is a weird one. The minute you slather your face with foundation, achieving that perfect look that does not exist in nature except in the blessed few, your lips scream out for colour. But I suppose it’s a matter of taste. And I find it really odd that the most popular make-up item in Britain, where the indigenous population does not have dark lashes, is not mascara. I hate to think what a woman looks like who wears foundation but not mascara or lipstick, but then maybe I’ve seen some already.

So now let’s consider men in recession. Apparently, while women are busy looking for little treats, men are amusing themselves by playing the martyr. Sales of men’s underpants have plunged. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, uses the men’s underpants metric to gauge the way things are going in the economy. A dip in sales of men’s pants, he said back in January last year, is a sure sign that things are about to take a turn for the worse.

Men’s underpants are economic flat-liners. In a stable economy, sales neither rise nor fall. To men, underwear is a serviceable item. Men do not buy pants to seduce, to feel sexy or because they are feeling frivolous. They buy them to keep their bits in place and to keep their trousers clean. If they do not find clean underpants in their drawers, they will pick up a used pair off the floor and make do with that. To men, pants are practical, and that is why there is no equivalent of Agent Provocateur, for men.

Greenspan says that it is precisely because of this that, when sales of men’s pants dip, you can see the bad times ahead. It means, he says, that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace their worn-out boxers and Y-fronts. “That is almost always a prescient, forward impression that here comes trouble,” he said.

Mintel, the global research company, has put out figures that show a relatively large drop in the sales of men’s underpants in the United States. Matt Hall, a spokesman for US underwear manufacturer Hanes thinks that there is nothing special about the drop in underwear sales. He said: “Men’s basic apparel products probably have the least fluctuating sales of all apparel. But recessions impact all categories and men’s underwear sales are no different. Men’s underwear is a replenishment item. If you see a dip in the market it is because of the economy… Men certainly aren’t wearing underwear less frequently than before.”

One hopes not. But we women know the truth – that men have found the perfect excuse to extend the serviceable life of their tattered, yellowed undergarments long past the day – make that year – when their wives and girlfriends would have binned them with a cheer. The thing that a lot of women don’t understand about a lot of men is their fond attachment to items of ancient clothing, particularly pants. I can hear the chorus go up right across recession-fraught North America and Europe, as men everywhere fish pants out of bins: “Why did you throw these away? They’re perfectly good. Don’t you know there’s a recession on?”

I have a theory of my own. It’s an open secret that, because men are so reluctant to buy new pants, it is usually the women in their lives who buy the pants for them – first their mothers, then their girlfriends, then their wives, and later on, when things go belly-up, more girlfriends. Left to his devices, the average man will own four pairs of pants and will wear them until they fall apart and spring holes (and leaks). So the people who are now not spending money on men’s pants are not men but women. Faced with restrictions on their spending, they’re thinking, “Bother his underpants, I’ll buy myself some lipstick instead.” Or foundation.



Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com