I Can’t Afford A House, So Why Don’t I Just Be Gorgeous?

A 33-year-old Chicagoan we’ll call Lana is wading through the security line at O’Hare, toting potato chips to avoid shelling out for an airport dinner. In eight hours, she’ll arrive at a resort in Mexico for her best friend’s wedding, and she’s pondering how much to contribute to the honeymoon fund. As a part-time yoga teacher one semester into grad school, she has $612.37 in her savings account, owes her sister $4,000 for help with rent, and is $56,000 deep in student loans. This trip alone costs $1,500.

Lana had just found out her ex — who only a few months prior texted her a six-paragraph apology asking to reconnect — was having a baby with his new 24-year-old girlfriend. “I’ve been thinking about how he’s going to afford that, and also how one day, I’m hopefully going to run into him looking really sexy,” Lana says.

It’s definitely possible. Every year, her New Year’s resolution is to get hotter, and she’s never failed. “I love making goals I can succeed at,” she says.

It started in 2022, when Lana broke up with that guy and began exploring her sexuality. Once a Bible-loving pageant queen in colorful J.Crew, she adopted a tomboy femme look — menswear-inspired baggy clothes with stacks of rings. She now gets long, witchy nails to scare men off ($100 every six weeks), collects fine-line tattoos ($1,000 a year), and lifts weights at the gym ($1,200 a year). She spends several thousand dollars annually at Sephora. And thanks to BeautyTok, Lana also sleeps with mouth tape, an eye mask, and a silk bonnet. “It looks like a hostage situation,” she admits.

If the cost of beauty sounds high, it’s nothing compared to real estate. Though 52% of millennials are now homeowners, another 24% believe they’ll never be able to save enough for a down payment. However, on average, they spend more money on cosmetics and aesthetic procedures than any other age bracket — $2,670 in 2023 compared with $2,048 for Gen Z and $1,517 among Gen Xers — as well as more on fitness.

What sits in that gap? The Millennial Glow-Up. Now ages 29-44, many millennials are bringing in enough cash to splurge on their well-being, but maybe not enough to reach more traditional financial goals, like buying a home and affording children. Caught in the middle, many are taking the same approach as Lana: “I don’t have enough money for these bigger investments, so why don’t I just be gorgeous?”

She sends the couple $200 and boards the plane.

“It’s the avocado toast and latte problem”

After seven years of saving for a down payment in Charleston, South Carolina, Mandy, a 28-year-old who makes a $150,000 base salary in consulting sales, decided to pivot. She moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she’s happier spending that money on self-care. She’s willing to drop any amount of cash on her body — including, recently, a $45 Pilates class on a yacht, plus $20 for parking. At one point, she had two monthly sauna memberships ($225 total) so she could sweat no matter which side of town she was on that day.

“I would love marriage, kids, and a white picket fence in the future,” she says. But for now, she enjoys skating around those expenses. “I have nothing and no one tying me down.”

Starting over isn’t always easy, though. Chelsea (whose name has been changed, like most of the other women interviewed for this story) earns just over $200,000 as an attorney — a steep pay cut from the $400,000 she earned at a previous firm that she found to be a poor values fit. She’s reckoning with the idea that she’ll need to move elsewhere if she ever wants to buy a desirable house. In San Francisco, her current city, homes sell for an average of $1.4 million. (A 20% down payment would be $280,000; the current 30-year fixed mortgage rate is 6.8%.) Even with a fiancé who works in private equity, she still feels priced out.

“Everyone I know who owns a house bought it with a partner. It does make dating feel more high stakes.”

“It’s a little bit of the avocado toast and latte problem,” she says. “If I stopped doing Botox quarterly, I’d be able to put another $1,400 in my home savings account every year.” But to her, that wouldn’t make a significant enough dent.

She started getting work done three years ago. At the time, she was working nearly 55 hours a week, and it showed — so she spent $3,000 on filler to reduce her undereye bags. She loved the results so much, she started exploring other procedures: Botox, facials, microblading, and more. She spends $5,000 to $7,500 per year on beauty treatments and also recently began microdosing semaglutide for $100 a week.

The perks aren’t just skin-deep. “It’s also wrapped up in expectations of professionalism, looking put together for court,” she says. “Especially as a woman, my smile lines don’t make me look mature and wise — they might make me look tired and untrustworthy.”

“$18,000 is a meaningful contribution to a house”

Emma used to worry she looked tired, too. At 29, she was living in Brooklyn, working in tech, and scrolling through endless before-and-after photos of lower blepharoplasties. Her bright blue-green eyes, one of her best features, had become less visible as her lids had gotten puffier with age. Now 31, she says, “It was very alienating, like some sort of dysmorphia, to not be able to recognize myself.”

She consulted several plastic surgeons, whose quotes ran from $3,5000 in New York to $18,000 in Tampa. Initially, she balked. “$18,000 is a meaningful contribution to a house,” she says. For years, she had been setting aside $3,000 a month with that goal in mind.

Ultimately, she paid $4,000 to a local doctor recommended by a friend. The results were thrilling — she looked and felt like herself again. “It has such a huge impact on my headspace and quality of life,” Emma says. “It freed me up to think about other things.”

“I was always like, ‘I’m never going to get my nails done — that’s so luxurious and irresponsible.’”

And it may have benefited her in other ways: Since the procedure, she has switched jobs twice, nearly doubling her income, to $270,000. She’s now a year away from affording her ideal down payment. “I can’t say it’s because I had my eyes done, but I have to believe that being happier with yourself allows you to be more successful and impactful in other areas of your life.”

She spends about $6,000 annually on beauty treatments including Botox ($500, twice a year), lash lifts and tints ($130, three times a year), acrylics ($1,300 per year), brow shaping ($96, three times a year), and more. Nearly two years after eye surgery, she says, “My only regret is not doing it sooner.”

For Danielle, a single 32-year-old in Massachusetts, the choice between beauty investments and longer-term investments isn’t so black and white. “Everyone I know who owns a house bought it with a partner,” she says. She hates the idea of depending on someone to fulfill that dream, but realistically she can’t buy her ideal home on her own. “It does make dating feel more high stakes.”

She spends about $5,000 a year on vanity, including monthly gel manicures. She typically spreads out her various appointments but once racked up a $1,200 bill in a single day. Her debit card got declined, and she was “sick over it.”

“When it’s spread out, you can kind of girl-math it away,” she says. “I’m in a new era of trying to be more financially responsible. Instead of getting blowouts once a week, it’s like, OK, important events only.”

“I feel constantly strapped”

Even those who do own property still wrestle with their priorities. Rose, 36, bought a two-bed, two-bath condo in Washington, D.C., with her husband for $570,000 in 2019. “My bathroom probably has a net worth of over $4,000,” she says of all the high-end beauty products in her medicine cabinet.

Rose is first-generation Chinese American. “My parents came here for their Ph.D.’s with nothing. We were raised with, ‘Spend nothing on yourself. Save, save, save,’” she says. “I’m so grateful for everything my parents did, but they chose to do that. I am choosing not to do that.”

In addition to at-home skin care, her beauty routine — facials, a personal trainer, and more — costs over $8,000 a year. (Her Labradoodle also gets $200 trims every six to eight weeks.) “I would love to get a gigantic house because I want several dogs,” she says. But for now, that’s out of reach.

Irene, a 37-year-old nurse practitioner who bought a two-bed, two-bath townhome outside of Denver with her fiancé for $407,000 in 2023, was also raised frugally. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to get my nails done — that’s so luxurious and irresponsible,’” she says.

“When it’s spread out, you can kind of girl-math it away.”

Now, they’re always done beautifully. Spending $8,000 a year on mani-pedis, haircuts, balayage, injectables, facials, microneedling, and a gym membership, she says, “I felt like I was almost doing the bare minimum.”

Irene is considering quitting Botox in order to take her extended family on vacation next year. She’d also love to travel more with friends and buy a cabin in the mountains someday, which would require scaling back further.

She used to fantasize about financial freedom — shopping outside the clearance section, ordering both an appetizer and an entrée without a second thought. For a while, she’d made it. Now, she says, “I really am upper-middle class by all definitions, but I feel constantly strapped, like I’m coming down to the wire every month.” Gazing at other women, “I am constantly wondering: How does she do it? How do you afford to be so hot?”