Visoot Uthairam/Getty Images They became a small luxury during the pandemic, according to NPD Group's Larissa Jensen. "If you think about what we all went through it could be ... consumers wanting to escape," she said. During hard times, economists have historically turned to something called the "lipstick index." The thinking goes that even when times are tough, people will still carve out room for small luxuries — like, say, a tube of lipstick. In 2020, times were certainly tough, but buying a tube of lipstick was suddenly pointless given that masks obscured our noses and mouths. Lipstick sales, and makeup sales overall, plummeted throughout 2020, making the lipstick index essentially obsolete.