“When things get tough, women buy lipstick,” — Leonard Lauder 

By PJ Parrish

I can still remember the first lipstick i ever bought. It was Yardley’s Baby Buff. This was sometime back in the early 60s, when I actually thought I was going to run away to London and somehow find John Lennon’s house. What I was going to do when I got there, well, that part is a little fuzzy. But that little tube of lipstick…

Okay, I didn’t buy it. I shoplifted it from Kmart. What can I say? I had no money, a rocky homelife, and was led astray by the super model Jean Shrimpton who was my personal style icon, in a time when I had no personal style. (That’s Jean up top, by the way)

Lipstick sales are booming these days. Last year, the global lipstick market was valued at roughly $17.5 billion and is projected to expand toward $19.6 billion this year. Why? Leonard Lauder knows. He’s the son of cosmetics queen Estee Lauder and he came up with the Lipstick Effect — in times of economic or social stress, consumers tend to comfort themselves with small luxuries. This has held true in all downturns, including the Great Depression, and was really notable after 9/11. 

You know what else is enjoying a boom right now? Romance novels. Now, we all know that book sale trends are cyclical. Traditional, pure sci-fi is struggling right now, being overshadowed by massive reader demand for fantasy, romantasy, and contemporary romance hybrids. This is going on even as the major film studios invest in sci-fi media. Standard historical fiction set between the 1930s and 2010 is also currently a tougher sell, with editors saying readers are drawn to ancient, 18th-century, or 19th-century settings, or completely fresh, unconventional perspectives on the past.

I’m not sure what all this means, other than the vibe I am picking up from articles about fiction trends is that in these times of economic uncertainty, escapism (either into the far past or into deep passion) seems to be the popular balm.

As an ex romance writer (I started out back in the late 80s), I suffered through the ups and downs. I had four fat family sagas (heavy on romance) published and was riding a good wave. Then things crashed and I was dropped. I got a new agent. I’ll never forget what she told me in her office the first day we met.

“What do you NOT see here?” she said, holding up a copy of that week’s New York Times bestseller list.

“My name?”

She didn’t laugh. “What you don’t see is romance novels. What you do see is mysteries. Go home and write one.”

This is a true story. This was the beginning of a neo-golden era in crime fiction, when Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, Patricia Cornwell, et al, were breaking out. It took me a couple false starts, but eventually I got published again.

Back to romance novels. The new boom is due in great part to the fact that the genre has changed mightily since I was writing. The diversity of characters and subjects is remarkable now. Sales during the first half of 2025 increased 24% compared to the same period the previous year, according to the research firm Circana, and the same report noted sales volume for romance books had more than doubled compared to four years prior.

Print sales of romance fiction in the US have doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, in the UK the romance and sagas category, which had for two decades made around £20m annually, leapt to a staggering £53.2m in 2022 during the pandemic, growing to £69m in 2024. (Source The Guardian:)

Romantic fiction handles big themes: chronic illness, global warming, divorce, death, betrayal and despair. Depression, anxiety and PTSD often appear – trauma, almost always. Pain, too. There’s the housing market, issues around antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, fatphobia, sexism, classism, all kinds of interdepartmental hatred and fear. All kinds of horror, love and loss…

And yet the trick is to hold all this very, very lightly. When romantic fiction tackles the problems of the world it must do so with such grace that you barely notice. It must do so in a way that makes the reader feel better about those things. Not for the romcom the unresolved ending, the unreliable narrator. The romcom must bring everything together, always, to a happy ending.

Years ago, I wrote a romance suspense novel. I’ve mentioned it here before, and told you how my agent sent it around and it was rejected by not only the publisher of my successfull thriller series, but by four other publishers. The verdict was unanimous — I had lazily assumed I could toss in some sex and a couple of cute one liners and call it a day. Nope. Like those sad literary cynics who try to write crime fiction, I didn’t understand the real beating heart of of the genre I was trying to invade.

I’m rewriting that book now, for the second time. It’s becoming clearer to me where I failed. I think I know what I have to do. And it’s a lot more than putting lipstick on a pig.