“When the world feels uncertain, people don’t reach for the quiet and the delicate. They reach for the chandelier.”
I’ve spent the last few years watching the jewellery industry closely. The spending patterns, the search data, the red-carpet moments, the retail numbers. And somewhere in all of that, I kept noticing something that didn’t fit the conventional wisdom.
Every time consumer confidence fell, I expected jewellery buyers to go quieter. Smaller pieces. More restrained choices. That’s what the textbooks suggest people do when they’re under pressure.
They weren’t doing that. If anything, there were signals that they were doing the opposite.
That observation is what led us at Something About Rocks to propose a new idea. We’re calling it the Chandelier Index. Here’s what we think it means.
First, some context on why the old indicators keep failing
Most people have heard of the Lipstick Index. Leonard Lauder coined it in 2001, observing that Estée Lauder lipstick sales were rising even as the economy weakened. The idea was simple: when people can’t afford the handbag, they buy the lipstick instead. A small treat to soften hard times.
It’s a nice theory. But it kept breaking down. By 2008 lipstick sales were actually falling during the recession, not rising. COVID killed it entirely. It’s hard to sell lipstick when everyone’s wearing a mask. Most recently, Estée Lauder reported a 10% drop in sales even as economic anxiety intensified. The substitution story simply doesn’t hold any mor
The Hemline Index is older and even shakier. Short skirts in good times, long hemlines in bad. This was attributed loosely to a 1920s economist, though the original research never quite said that. It made sense when there was one fashionable hem length. Fashion fragmented, and the signal went with it.
Both of these are comfort stories. They assume that when times get hard, people seek small consolations.
What we saw in jewellery was something different. Not discretion. Assertion.
What the data actually shows
Here’s the pattern we’ve been tracking. Google Trends search interest for bold, maximalist and statement jewellery has risen consistently since 2021. Right through UK inflation hitting an 11.1% peak in October 2022, right through the US consumer confidence crash, and it’s still rising now. Meanwhile searches for minimalist and delicate jewellery have stayed essentially flat throughout the same period. According to Pinterest’s 2024 trend report, searches for “maximalist jewellery” surged 3,460% in the summer of 2024.
American consumer confidence just hit its lowest recorded level in the University of Michigan’s survey, a series that goes back to 1952. Below the financial crisis. And additionally, below COVID. And the Chandelier Index is at a five-year high.
That is not a comfort pattern. That is people deciding to be seen.
A note on methodology, because transparency matters here: the index we’ve built uses Google Trends normalized search data, relative measures rather than absolute counts. This is a hypothesis, not a peer-reviewed study. The next step is building a proper retail panel that tracks bold-versus-delicate sell-through data quarterly. That doesn’t exist publicly yet. When it does, the index becomes definitive.
What this means if you’re running a jewellery business
The practical implication is uncomfortable for anyone whose planning assumptions are built on the old model.
Weighting your buy toward delicate, accessible pieces during downturns and shifting to statement when confidence recovers is lipstick-index logic. The data doesn’t support it anymore. The assertion impulse doesn’t switch off when confidence falls. If anything, it intensifies.
Why we think naming it matters
The Chandelier Index doesn’t claim to predict recessions. What it claims is simpler: that when people are under pressure, the jewellery they reach for tells you something real about how they feel about themselves. Not whether they’re rich or poor. Whether they want to be seen or not.
The Lipstick Index told us people wanted comfort. The Chandelier Index tells us they want presence. Right now, they want to be seen.
What the Feed Said – this week’s biggest jewellery stories
